Technology Forks

Observations

You know what’s a pain in the head? Trying to build a DVR computer and plan for the future addition of an HD TV at the same time. I was ready to pounce on the $130 HD tuner card from ATI when I realized that that card will only receive HD broadcasts over the air. Anything in HD on cable and even regular digital cable channels are going to require the digital cable box and be unreadable with the tuner card. It’s not that I have digital cable now or an HD TV now, but I fully expect that I will someday.

To top it off, I got a call from Charter on Friday and it turns out that they’re not even providing DVR anymore. They just give you the digital decoder and every show ever broadcast “on demand.” They wanted me to try it at a discount for three months and I told the guy I wanted to try it but I wanted more of a discount. To my surprise he wasn’t playing that game; so I passed.

Anyway, I don’t know where this technology is going right now so I’m going to stick with the tried and true VCR for now. It looking like I may actually be able to skip an entire generation of technology (that is, the standard definition DVR).