BeigeJournal

I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and have Time Warner cable television (and broadband Internet) service. I have had their digital video recorder (DVR) service for about a week now. They charge an extra $6 per month for DVR, which last time I checked was half the Tivo service fee, plus the cable company DVR includes two cable tuners built in. I can now, for the first time since I was a child, record one show while watching another. We could do that easily in pre-cable days, but with cable you’d need a second cable box, and who wants to pay for that?

The box is a Scientific Atlanta product, as usual. The thing works. It records shows, it plays them back. You can record two at once and watch one of them or a previously recorded third show. It won’t tell you how close to full the disk is, and there seems to be no indication at all how much capacity it has. I guess the cable company wouldn’t want to confuse their customers by telling them the most basic bit of information about a recorder. It can be set to record a single show or each episode of an entire series, but it has no concept of reruns, so if set to record a series it will get the early east-coast showing, the later west-coast showing, the rerun the next afternoon, and if they rerun it on the weekend, too, it will get that, too. You can and will end up with two or three (Or more! They rerun the “Daily Show” a lot) copies of each episode that you will have to delete manually. I don’t know if Tivo has the same problem. It does retain whatever information about the show that the program guide has, so you can do your deleting on the basis of that without having to watch a minute of each to see which are the same.

The remote control that the thing comes with is excellent. If you are geeky enough to read the instructions and type in lots of codes, you can get it to power up and down the cable box, TV, and stereo with one button press. You can get the volume control buttons to operate the stereo system’s volume. Very nice.

It does add one more faint sound to the noise background of our lives, a very faint whir of the spinning disk and the more noticeable ticking of the disk seeking constantly. It never spins down the disk, and it never stops seeking the disk, either, though it seeks just two or three times a second when it “isn’t doing anything.” It isn’t really a problem, but it is easily heard from across the room in the TV-watching couch.