Art

I noticed with some grumpiness this morning that although my digital cable had adjusted correctly to the new daylight savings time, my DVR settings did not, so my show recordings are all off by an hour — instead of recording Desperate Housewives, then Gray’s Anatomy, my DVR recorded Gray’s Anatomy and the evening news instead. Combined with the general wonkiness of the DVR’s recording in general, this didn’t make me happy. I have to go in an tweak my settings in ways that I should not have to, or I occasionally will miss something.
I know must have happened because I had the selection of “record all episodes of this show in this time slot” instead of “record all episodes of this show at all times.” But the second setting results in recording five versions of the same episode, or causing repeated episodes to “bump” other original airings of shows off the schedule without warning. I have no way to tell it to prioritize one show over another, and it doesn’t tell me if it has bumped a show off my recording schedule, so I don’t know to go back and add it in later. That’s broken.
With some other video recording programs, you can tell the recorder to get every episode of a show, but to only record any episode one time, so the when a network re-airs a program, the DVR sees it’s a duplicate episode and ignores it. You can also program them to prioritize one show over another if the schedule moves around and you accidentally try to record more than two things at once. And they will tell you what show was bumped off the schedule, so you can go back and re-set it to record the next week
I have some friends who were showing off their satellite TV/Tivo combination package, which currently weighs in at less money every month that my cable, with more features and reliability, including the ability to transfer shows from one TV to another, so I could move a show upstairs to the bedroom to watch it. I hate to go to all the trouble of doing that, but given that I’m paying more for less service, it might be time to make the switch.