PVR: The arsenal of freedom

Steve, you're in the wrong profession. You could be making a lot more cash in advertising or public relations.

DVD's?

How do you get programs from your PVR onto disc? I thought they were locked. I asked my son (who is quite electronically savvy)about this and he said it can be done, but is very hard to do. How do you do it??

Don't worry about it

All the content will be floating around on the net eventually. There's no reason to build a collection of electrons on your household devices.

What is a PVR?

And then there are us poorer citizens who barely can afford to subscribe to the lowest level, and are stuck with a handful of channels, and have no PVR or videorecorder.
Ahh yes, the problems of the rich, my heart bleeds for you!

This is the best that the Tyee can come up with for the weekend? like nothing has happened that is of interest?

Stop the bleeding and get a life

alive seems to question the newsworthiness of this story. I'm sorry you are unable to watch cable or buy/rent a PVR but why criticize The Tyee for running this story. It is classified under mediacheck not late breaking news. Like Stephanie I am very interested in how the author was able to transfer his PVR recordings to disc and I hope he will respond.

Making DVDs

I didn't go into detail in the piece, so I failed to mention another necessary piece of equipment. I have a Panasonic model DVD/VCR recorder. It's connected to my PVR and then to the TV. To make a DVD it is necessary to play the movie in real time. Insert a blank disc, start the movie and hit record. I sometimes start the process before going to bed and let it record overnight. Unfortunately there's no faster way to do it.

No news is bad news

exalbertan
Since you did not get the point, let me explain:
I have no problem if the Tyee runs a story about how to cut your fingernails or how to copy to a DVD, OK?

My objection is that this site supposedly deals with social and economic issues. People go here to get the latest info about what is happening in the world, hopefully reported more accurately than the regular media does.

For whatever reason very little "meat" is here to chew on from Friday to Monday; and by then the newsworthyness is long gone.

So when absolutely nothing is offered here, you are likely to get an outburst like mine.

Alive

If I may have the temerity to speak for the exalted Mr. Beers:

The Tyee certainly does deal with social and economic issues, and it's safe to say that as it has developed a following, those aspects of The Tyee have come to the fore for readers.

But The Tyee was never intended solely for that purpose. It has been since its inception a general interest publication, albeit one with a distinct political lean. The Tyee was always intended to be a big tent for many types of stories and comment.

Tip for Alive

There's this thing I do with newspapers & magazines, online or print. I skim the headline and story introductions for what I deem of interest to me as a reader. If I don't see any value for me in the piece, I skip and move on the next. It's an effective strategy, and you really ought to try it.

There are times when I don't see much news value in a piece, but I'll stick around anyway for pure cheeky entertainment value, and the odd time I may even resort to taking a good natured, or not so good natured, shot at the author.

I do a lot more stopping and reading than skimming and bypassing at the Tyee than I do at the Sun or most other corporate rags, so I can cut Beers et al quite a bit of slack for allowing the likes of Burgess to talk about TV.

Why Warbler, you old charmer.

The likes of me thank you for the slack.

I don't think alive...

...needs any more advice. Someone with both the patience and circumstances of a Job can be forgiven for a brief rant that actually speaks for me too - Tyee advertises itself as a political fish, and while some of us have the leisure to engage in other pursuits that Tyee now also seems to be catering to, some, like alive, have a struggle each day just to get to the end of it, and it's disappointing when you come for a meal of salmon, to get a plateful of Charlie the Tuna instead.

No offense, Burgess, but I'd have had more sympathy if you'd lost a collection of Iranian documentaries instead of Mafia bumpf. Those are a lot harder to track down.

Speak on, alive.

The nub

I don't have a TV - but I'm paying Shaw $53 a month just for cable internet access. All the pundits are saying today's TV will be dead in five years and everything will be on the internet. It can't come soon enough for me.

While I found Burgess' article interesting in a technical sense, saving movies and burning them to a dvd is plain silly.

I'll get a TV one day, but just to watch dvds or online content. A lot of excellent dvds (movies, docs, etc) can be borrowed free from the library (VIRL in my case).

I can already watch films, documentaries, news, or whatever online - free. The NFB has an amazing online collection, as do Hot Docs and many others. For old movies, check out The Criterion Collection and The Auteurs. The CBC has almost all its programs online and Comedy Central rounds out the field. Old TV series are starting to show up too - The Prisoner can be watched online now.

Who needs cable TV - or satellite? The internet is the future, IMHO.

Legal?

Sorry to hear that you lost everything on your PVR. It would the TV series stuff that I watch from my PVR that would really upset me. Old movies will always be on again, but if you miss an episode of whatever ... that blows>

Now really ... is it technically legal to make a permanent copy of a movie shown on TV? Even if it's only for your own, personal use? I always thought that that broke copyright. Maybe I've been tricked to think that! Darn confusing copyright laws!

Oh ya ... as to the internet. You end up paying for all those movies and shows, in general, unless you (that's right) don't believe in copyright laws. I doubt the TV is going anywhere soon.

wow...

A bunch of shockers here in the comments section...including some claims to charm never heretofor evidenced... but I digress.

Steve says the Tyee was always intended as a general interest publication, indeed, who'd care to argue with that? Whose general interest might be the question - as zalm has pointed out, the interests of those searching for a job, or trying to find a place to live in an increasingly unaffordable province, or those suffering in dozens of other ways here in 'the best place on earth' just not might be piqued by Steve's "wry and self-deprecating" ruminations in this particular piece.(No offense Steve, you can be a great writer when you try.) It seems to me that if the Tyee truly aspires to being 'general interest', then the troubles and concerns and day-to-day ephemera that concern a wider socio-economic cross section than is evidenced here might be in order...

But whether you agree or disagree with me, or alive,for that matter, kindly refrain from directions as to what we ought to post or what we ought to read here at the Tyee. The fact that you may not like our comments tells us that we should, indeed be posting them, if for no other reason to disturb your smug and self-satisfied world of oughts.

Cheers, and smilies, Tyee people!

To the naysayers of this article

Do you pay for a monthly internet connection? Do you have a monthly smart-phone bill? The man's talking PVR here. Even modest wage earners such as my self can embrace all the beauty that PVR is. Chillax. The Tyee has an excellent "light" side as well.

My PVR

Steve B., I hope you got an extended warranty on your Panasonic unit. Mine died about a year and a bit after buying it. Usually I don't like expensive extended warranties, but in this case, with new technologies, the repair shop told me it would cost more to fix than buying a new one.

Warbler, I agree 100% with "skimming and reading" the Sun vs. the Tyee, plus all those "cheeky comments", so long as they're reasonably tasteful and clever.

Inclined, try Shaw high speed light for $20 a month less; it works well for single computers except some heavy duty video games.

Also, don't believe all the pundits, especially the ones that keep trying to forecast trends. Just think, hovercars, jet packs, Betamax, etc.

Many of us still like reading real books or listening to the radio, especially when they're free; no monthly charges at a PUBLIC library, for now at least. I really don't like more and more of these monthly charges.

Do we want Kindle, Amazon, Google and the like gate keeping what information we can access, but that is surely "the trend" on the web more recently, all in the name of controlling racist and other hate messages, terrorist communication and child porn (surely sore points of open communication), but it can and is easily sliding into government censorship (China, UAE, etc.) and large corporate domination. Cloud computing has its place, but archiving must remain solid and independent.

Vivian, "general interest" is OK for the Tyee, so long as we don't dumb the discourse down to the level of The Province or worse yet, the Metro.