New Technology TV

As digital video recorders have become more technically sophisticated and more pervasive in people's homes, there have also been more and more glitches that have caused difficulties and inconveniences with them. A recent example of problems with digital video recorders was seen with Directv's high definition TiVo units. These newer digital video recorders that are capable of recording high definition television programming as well as normal TV on their internal hard drives were having a series of glitches and malfunctions that caused the recorders to fail to record TV shows and to delete previously recorded video for no apparent reason. The problems displayed by the TiVo units are exactly the kinds of mishaps that you would expect with the old fashioned VCR, and what digital video recorders as a whole were supposed to avoid. For example, the whole point of a digital video recorder was to replace the clumsy, inconvenient numerical programming interface of the obsolete VCR with an intuitive to use graphic user interface. The idea was that unlike programming a VCR, when you program a digital video recorder you would know exactly which channel and time slot the machine was set to record and then- barring a power outage or the TV service going out temporarily- you'd have the TV show or movie digitally recorded on the DVR's hard drive after it aired. Because of that expectation of digital video recorders in general, the malfunctions associated with TiVo were really a slap in the face to their users.

The good thing about digital video recorders in general, is that since they function on subscription basis, their software can easily be updated using the same kind of data connection that they use to receive program guides. That's exactly what TiVo did with this glitch. It devised a software patch and then sent it to the units with the broken programming. Apparently, even after having received the patch, the high def TiVo units continued to malfunction. Now though, TiVo is saying that the systems simply need to be rebooted for the software patch to take effect. The fact that a home entertainment system would need to be rebooted in order to function properly definitely points out that digital video recorders are pretty much just computers in disguise.

There are digital video recorders on the market though that don't go nearly as far to disguise their similarities to normal computers though. These digital video recorders are based on either the Windows operating system or a Linux distros. Both of these types of digital video recorders give a lot more options to combine different kinds of media into the home entertainment experience. For example, both types tend to have DVD players built in and at least one type of Linux system is capable of burning video recorded on its hard drive off of TV onto DVD's. The Linux based system also functions as a home computer system with the ability to connect to a broadband home network, surf the Internet, and use productivity software like OpenOffice.org. The other advantage of using a Linux based digital video recorder is that if there are bugs in the system, you can be sure that someone out there is coming up with a good solid fix to the problem.