Reading the TV

How many channels have you got at your place? How many of them do you watch? Do you have the first clue what's on 80% of them? When you do sit down with a listings magazine and see what's on that might be of interest, how often do you find that the 3 programs you might watch that week are all on at the same time .. and anyway, you are out.

You'd be better off reading a book. At least with a book, you can just stick the marker in and do something else for a bit, then come back to it. You can have 2 or 3 books going at the same time if you want, to match whatever mood you may be in.

Shame you can't do that with the TV. So why can't you?

You have been able to do something like this for a long time; since the invention of the Video Casette Recorder (VCR) in fact. You can tape programs while you are out. You can pause playback and then carry on. So what's the big deal? It's a question of ergonomics. Finding the right spot on a VCR tape has never been particularly easy. Some manufacturers added technology to allow the user to jump to the start of a program, but not to carry on where they left off if the tape had been used since. You also have to be sitting in front of the thing to watch the program. It also doesn't help you to thrash through the listings jungle, although it does allow you to bypass the increasingly brainless, long winded and annoying advert breaks on the channels you have to pay to see in the first place.

Of the above requirements, the need to get a handle on the vast pile of programming being sent into our TVs, points the way the clearest. This is the sort of problem that generally requires a computer. The Anvil Organisation Ltd has been experimenting with a software stack that allows the user to do exactly that. The package is MythTV running on the Linux operating system. In case you don't know, both of these are free.

Andrew Meredith  <andrew@anvil.org> Last modified: Thursday, 01-Jun-2006 11:37:01 BST