I think I figured it out. Originally vcrs were designed to work all by itself without any cable box. You’d plug in either your antenna signal or cable hookup directly from the wall to the vcr, then the vcr would go to your tv and that would be the entire setup.
With that setup, you can toggle your vcr’s “tv/vcr” button to switch back and forth between what the vcr sees and what your tv sees. In this setup, you would change the channel with the channel features on both your vcr and tv, since both could decode all the channels themselves. Once cable is introduced, you end up with a lot of “just leave it on channel 3 forever.”
So anyway, that old antenna / basic cable hookup is, I think, exactly what DIY dvrs are. They all pretty much assume you aren’t trying to include premium channels in this setup because you literally can’t.
So that’s the real answer to my confusion: What I’m imagining (a homemade dvr that can record HBO) doesn’t and can’t legally exist. However, it doesn’t need to. Premium channels have no commercials to skip, meaning the streaming version is perfectly adequate. (Still no slow, frame advance, and the pause is goddawful, obscuring the screen but whatever.) So I don’t actually need to worry about the premium channels. HBO (was HBO Go?) for right now would suffice for all my HBO needs, then whenever HBO Max comes to roku I could switch to that.
I could theoretically do a pretty decent homemade dvr for just basic cable, except that…
You’re not wrong. Upthread it was said that cable companies hated offering the card. The replacement set top box I got yesterday had a metal plate screwed on blocking the card slot to prevent any kind of card nonsense like allowing 3rd party dvrs to work.
I really am not sure what to do. Unfortunately, the immediate future will become a problem because we like to watch the same NFL games in different rooms (different tvs) with different amounts of time-shifting to skip commercials and whatnot. Of course with the “upgrade” I just got, you cannot watch the same recording on two different tvs. That’s not a supported feature. Meaning tomorrow night’s kickoff game, either we all watch it together (with conflicting viewing habits) or someone won’t get to start watching it until the other one finishes it.
And you know how the modern way of consuming shows and movies is streaming, like netflix, while cable is old-school? What’s the first thing netflix asks you? “Who are you?” That lets you personalize your viewing experience, which is what I think of when I think of modern viewing. Personalized. Well we had that, for years and years, but now it’s gone. We’re now stuck with only a single dvr that everyone has to share. Even amazon prime (finally) added user profiles.
At every turn this “upgrade” has sent me two steps back.