Beyond the wit of mortal man
I love technology, I really do. I’ve got my iPod, digital camera, DVD player, bittorrent, mobile phone, tiny remote-control helicopters, blah, blah, blah. We really do live in the future. I first listened to the Beatles’ White Album on my parents’ radiogram some time in the early 1970s. Now, I carry those songs around in my pocket.
And now I’ve got my PVR – Personal Video Recorder. It’s basically a Freeview tuner bolted to a hard disc drive. You set the timer for a programme using the Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) and the box records that programme onto the hard drive for later viewing.
Except, what’s the point of an EPG that says a programme starts at X o’clock and ends at Y o’clock when the programme doesn’t start at X o’clock and end at Y o’clock? Or rather, what’s the point of a broadcaster who can’t begin and end a programme at the advertised time? It’s just as well bomb disposal experts aren’t so cavalier about time keeping. Imagine Olympic sprinting if everybody could start when they bloody well liked.
Video Cassette Recorders were clunky and the playback quality was naff but at least it would have recorded the end of ‘Three Men In Another Boat’ the other night and not cut out just before Griff Rhys Jones finds out how much his boat is worth. (I’m not proud I recorded TMIAB but I quite like Dara O Briain and it was the visual equivalent of Horlicks that brought my heartbeat back down to a safe level after having been to see I Am Legend.)
If I have to endure another session of tears from the kids because the PVR has clipped the end of Doctor Who or Robin bastard Hood, I’m going to find the home phone number of the Director General of the BB-shitting-C and phone him every time it happens so he can endure the lamentations of my children as well.
Like a government that was never going to be able to clean up the street of Basra when it couldn’t even scrape the dogshit off the streets of Brighton, surely we’re unlikely to see the cure for cancer (and, more importantly, jetpacks and flying cars) until we can get a television programme to begin and end on time?
Posted on January 5th, 2008 at 3:56pm under Miscellaneous misanthropy, Pooterism, Science and progress
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• 5 Comments |
Ah yes, the Beeb are awfully cavalier about programme start times. I’ve had the same problem with my yummy Pioneer DVD/HDD recorder. Trick is to pad the timer setting by at least three minutes either side. Though to be fair, things were exactly the same in the VHS era.
Naturally all broadcasters could easily have thier programmes starting and ending at the exact times listed but choose not to.
‘Pad the timer‘? What is this, the Middle Ages? I thought the EPG was supposed to liberate us from such tyranny.
never a problem on channel 5, they usually end programmes 5 mins early to get some extra ads in, now just got to find something worth recording on five.
“Trick is to pad the timer setting by at least three minutes either side.”
Nah, make it 10 minutes either way – I missed whole chunks of Charlie Brooker during the hols, programmes that would for me have lightened the terrifying, tinsel-vomitty cultural stalag we know as Xmas!
Another mince pie? – don`t mind if I do.
I had that problem with our HDD freeview box, much to the amusment of Mrs -O, as I couldn’t get a whole programme recorded with the VHS either.
Now though, it’s gone the other way, we get the EPG up and press the record button to set the timer, and it gets the programme we want ok. and the one after. and the one after that too. and the one after that! The bloody thing won’t stop recording!!