Davey Vs The Tube

How can it be, that I can master PHP, romance MySQL?, flirt with PostgreSQL? and sleep with Linux and yet… I can’t sort out my home entertainment center.

As I mentioned I recently celebrated my 21st birthday. For this occassion, my mum and others bought me a $200 Amazon Gift Certificate.

Being a book/CD/DVD/Electronics nut, this is the perfect gift.

I finally (after about a week of deliberation) bought an RCA DVD Recorder. Something we’ve been wanting to add to our home entertainment center for a long while.

It arrived today, after 4 agonizing days of waiting and so I set out to replace our existing DVD player with this gizmo. However, there is one complication, Digital Cable.

We also have a stereo system in addition to the TV speakers for sound. We use both because it gives us a more audible vocal range and also allows us to watch TV late at night with the stereo off, without disturbing the other members of our household.

The cable splitter that came with the DVD Recorder is for analog cable only, and as such does not work. So I first of all, try my own home-brew setup with the S-Video cable. This didn’t work.

Then they have an alternate wiring diagram for Digital Dish/Cable setups, so I tried this. Again, no success.

After 2hrs of fighting with way too many cables, we declared a truce.

I have it now setup, to where I can watch TV, play/record DVDs (from the cable box/pvr) and have sound through the stereo and TV… however there are two drawbacks; I cannot get just TV sound, and to watch TV, the stereo, DVD recorder AND cable box all must be on.

*sigh*

I will battle with it again tomorrow, I’m going to try to use the VCR output on the Cable/DVR to put all visual/audio to the TV directly using AV2, then if you want to watch and record, you turn to AV1 and play it through the DVD recorder.

Why can’t you script real life?

– Davey