Posted by Martin Underwood on 10/28/06 16:11

Jukka Aho wrote in message
wjG0h.40026$Jj1.10645@reader1.news.jippii.net:

> [1] VHS VCRs are on their way out in the PAL land. People are
> increasingly buying HDD recorders for time-shifting purposes and DVD
> recorders for archival purposes. One contributing factor to the
> impending demise of the VHS standard is that there do not seem to be
> VHS VCRs available with a DVB-T/C tuner/decoder. (Not analog VHS VCRs
> and not digital D-VHS recorders, either.) For example, Finland (where
> I live) is going to switch to completely digital broadcasts (cable and
> terrestrial alike) by the next September. Even those who have been the
> slowest to adopt digital broadcasts are now slowly finding out that
> their old VHS VCRs - which of course only have an analog tuner - are
> quite useless and awkward in this new digital world. They would either
> need to buy a separate set-top-box for their VCR or ditch the VCR and
> buy a HDD-based (time-shifting) DVB set-top-box with twin tuners. The
> choice is usually obvious. On the other hand, the quality of the
> available VCR models has come down and "prosumer" VHS VCRs (or S-VHS
> VCRs, for that matter) don't seem to be available or in production any
> longer.

Maybe things are a bit further advanced in Finland since the changeover to
digital is happening sooner than with us in the UK. Here, there are very few
TVs or video recorders of any sort which include digital tuners: the
expectation is that you have to buy a separate set-top box. Sadly there is
no control bus to allow the video recorder to turn on the set-top box,
select the correct channel on it, and then turn it off afterwards.
Consequently you have to program the timed events twice: once on the video
recorder and then again on the set-top box.

Some hard-disk-only recorders have had digital tuners for a year or so, but
only now are manufacturers beginning to introduce models of DVD recorders or
DVD/HDD recorders which have built-in digital tuners.

Also, some well-established capabilities of analogue VHS recorders, such as
the recording of teletext subtitles as closed captions (as opposed to being
burnt-into the picture) and the identification of programmes by title in a
tape library (picked up from teletext), are not available with current
set-top boxes. Given that set-top boxes of one sort or another have been
around for many years, it's surprising that they didn't design them to
incorporate a simple teletext encoder to take subtitles and programme title
from the digital signal and generate teletext that a VHS recorder can
decypher, as they can with analogue broadcasts. That way, people's existing
analogue recorders keep the same functionality with digital boradcasts,
rather than regressing and losing functionality.

Separate set-top boxes, with the extra faffing around programming events
twice, may be acceptible to technologically-minded people, but the average
person (eg my parents) percieves it as "just too complicated". Truly
integrated TVs and video recorders (or else separate decoders than could be
controlled by SCART lead from the recorder) would solve this problem.

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