Smart scheduling
There are few things more annoying than setting up your video to record a programme, only to find that the golf has over-run the scheduled slot. My VCR supports Programme Delivery Control (PDC), which is a code supposedly sent by Ceefax to signal the start and end of any given programme, so that your VCR would start the recording at the right time, even if the schedules changed. However, it only works on analogue broadcasts, and when I say ‘works’ I actually mean ‘works once in a blue moon’. So I abandoned that method a while ago, and just hope that the schedulers don’t mess around with things too badly.
Now it seems that EyeTV has finally got it right. We set up EyeTV to record American Dad, which—-according to the Radio Times—-was supposed to start at 11pm, with ‘Family Guy’ on after it at 11:20pm. When I checked the programme guide within EyeTV, it said that the shows were the opposite way around, with Family Guy on first, so I clicked the button to schedule the recording and left it at that. Later on, we noticed on flipping channels that the schedules had been rearranged more seriously, and the repeat of Hyperdrive was on at 11pm, with American Dad following at 11:30pm. So I trudged upstairs to edit the scheduled recording, only to find that it had magically reset its start time from 11:20pm to 11:30pm. Yay!
We’re really enjoying EyeTV, and are increasingly using it to record stuff that we might have otherwise watched live. I watched my recording of ER last night, first snipping out all the adverts. It made the programme an absolute joy to watch, and reduced an hour of material to 42 minutes. Even fast-forwarding through adverts is annoying, and it’s only when you watch something that you’re used to seeing punctuated by breaks that you realise how much it improves the dramatic experience to see it ad-free.
