Digital couch potatoes, arise! - #27

That's right -- record all those Sean Connery classics while you work. Or, maybe not. As far as Dan Rutter's concerned, it is all just a pain in the arse.

PVRs kick arse. It's a shame that Aussies can't use 'em.

Well, we can, but it's a big pain.

A PVR, for those of you a few inches behind the nerdly cutting edge, is a Personal Video Recorder. That's one of the dumber acronyms of our time; when last I checked, there was no law prohibiting personal ownership of VCRs. They're also known as DVRs, or Digital Video Recorders. They record video to disk, generally in MPEG format.

A computer with a video capture card in it will serve as a basic PVR, and every rinky-dink TV tuner card on the market today comes with software that'll let you do VCR-ish tricks with your PC. Better models give you basic PVR features too, like pausing live TV (and keeping on recording it in the background; PVRs can record and play back simultaneously).

Proper PVRs, like the market leading TiVo and ReplayTV, can do a lot more. They can, for instance, automatically record stuff you seem likely to enjoy. Tell your TiVo to record Dragonheart, The Hunt for Red October, The Rock and The Name of the Rose, and it'll have a hunch that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade might, for some reason, be right up your alley.

PVRs first came out in the States in 1999; they've been popular since 2000. Not just among incurable couch potatoes, either; just because they automatically record so much stuff doesn't mean you have to watch it all. It just means you can. Any time you like. No more undercooking your eggs so you won't miss the beginning of Futurama. No more scrabbling for a tape and hurried program-setting so you won't miss The West Wing while you're out.

PVRs don't figure out what's on by mental telepathy, of course. They have to get program guide data -- including all the metadata about who's in what, genres, episodes in series and so on -- from somewhere. The 'somewhere' is a service run by the PVR maker, or one of their affiliates, which the PVR accesses by dialling in with a built-in modem in the wee small hours now and then or, for newer models, by using your broadband Internet connection.
Which is all very well, except that no PVR program guide services exist for Australia.

Australia does have digital TV guides; ebroadcast.com.au, for instance, for which enterprising hackers have created software which converts Web listings into PVR guide files. Getting a suitable PVR that works in Australia, though, requires further hacking -- if it's a US model then you'll need to convert it from NTSC to PAL, and the tuner will need changing too, at the very least. It is not an off-the-shelf proposition.

There's a further problem with Aussie PVRing. If you just want to record free-to-air programming -- and that's all most Australian TV viewers watch, much to the dismay of Foxtel and Optus Vision -- you have to contend with the mystic ability of the Aussie commercial networks to run shows at times other than those promised.

It happens all the time, these days. A show or two runs over-length for some reason, pushing everything ten, twenty, thirty minutes late, until the slack's pulled back in by dropping one of the 'Butt-Bender Super Exercise Hamster Wheel For Humans' ads at three in the morning.

As a result, people who program their VCR to record the Formula One at 0200 hours, and neglect to use a whole five hour tape to record a two hour event, get a sinking feeling when they discover that a movie-length episode of Silk Stalkings hadn't quite started yet when the race was meant to be kicking off.

A cynic might suggest that this extraordinary programming sloppiness is deliberate. Not to screw up PVR users -- there aren't enough of them yet for the networks to care -- but just to annoy VCR users, who're likely to fast-forward through the ads.
Commercial networks do not like you doing that.

I'd pay money to see a PVR enthusiast try to persuade Kerry Packer to tighten up scheduling, so that people can use hard disk recorders to more easily skip his ads. Man -- they'd never find the freakin' body.

You can get around sloppy scheduling with fat ugly recording margins on either side of each timeslot, of course, but then you can't record consecutive programs on different channels; the current mainstream PVRs can still only tune one channel at a time.
And there's not much else you can do.

Grabbing TV shows via your friendly neighbourhood legally dubious P2P client is not a PVR alternative. Quite apart from finding what you want, and download limits, and the agony of people still stuck on dial-up -- P2P program grabbing, like fooling with VCRs, takes time out of your day. PVRs give you time back.

Things'll get better, though. Australia may never be a big enough market to get full-featured commercial PVRs, but all that's needed is a free local program listing service (EBroadcast and www.imdb.com tied together with a fat wad of Perl code. . .), with accompanying software that works with various popular tuner cards. Even with multiple tuner cards, so you can record more than one channel at once.

If you're holding your breath for this, though, I think you're going to be very blue indeed before you can chuck your timeshifting tapes.