26 December, 2006

Extracting the digit

A couple of months ago, I bought a Freeview digital TV receiver (set-top box) for my mother's birthday.  There was a complication in connecting it to the existing network of TV, VCR and DVD Recorder, so I left the final configuration to my mother's partner, a self-defined enthusiast.

Yesterday I discovered that whilst the system plays nicely together, and it's possible to watch one channel, record another to video and a third to DVD, the channels must all be analogue. One can watch digital TV, and record whatever's on the screen, but there's no way to record straight from the digibox – turn off the TV and recording ceases.
I found this a little odd, and tried to trace the fault, but that's not the really odd thing.

There is no fault. The system is deliberately configured this way, because my mother's partner can conceive of no circumstance in which anyone would wish to record digital TV – there's simply no point in connecting the receiver to the recorder(s), apparently. Digital is "all repeats".

Needless to say, he doesn't own a set-top box himself.