Yes, to all of these. Birds Of Prey in particular is, I believe, a DC property, therefore owned by Warner Bros, which is owned by Time-Warner, along with HBO and all are owned by AT&T.
Ah, dang. This is complicated. It sure seems like there should be a way. Something does seem to be afoot, however, when Sling only allows saving 50 hours of programs in the cloud
Nice! Now if only I could try HBO Max with my rokus. Maybe by Christmas.
A small capacity dvr (<100 hours) offers convenience but doesn’t really let you binge watch. Right now I would only be recording three shows: Lovecraft Country, We Hunt Together, and The Vow. I would wait to record all the episodes then binge them. That’s probably 20 hours right there and these seasons are super short.
This time last year (when the pandemic hadn’t halted Hollywood production) I was saving up probably a half dozen shows to binge, most of them 10 to 13 episodes per season. In the fall that could balloon up a dozen shows (Walking Dead kicks in, FX joins the party, etc…), plus NFL games at 4 hours a pop in case of overtime, and of course my endless list of movies. I have, on multiple occasions, pinned my 175-hour dvr at 100%.
I can only assume that most dvrs store very little because most people just watch one episode per week of whatever shows they watch and so don’t need any actual “storage” space. They’re more like buffers than storage.
I’m reading about how to set up a computer as a dvr. In all of them, they say:
No set top box is mentioned. But isn’t the set top box required in order to unscramble the signal for premium channels like HBO? I’m so confused.
Yeah. most people aren’t saving episodes to binge watch at the end of the season. They’re either timeshifting or using the DVR as a buffer to skip commercials.
I use one of these. Set it to a channel from your cable box, channel 3 here.HD DVR / DVD Recorder with HD Digital Twin Tuner
My guess is that they are talking about attaching the cable connection that you would usually attach to the TV to the video capture card- so that if you need a set-top box *, you would attach the set-top box to the video capture card ( which if IIRC is how connecting cable worked with VCRs - the cable from the box went to the VCR and there was another connection between the VCR and TV)
- I don’t believe every set up does.
I think a set top box is required for premium channels just as a general rule. If you plug your tv directly into the cable coming out of the wall, the tv can play basic cable without a set top box. But if you try to go to a premium channel like HBO or Showtime, the picture would be all scrambled. You need a set top box to unscramble it.
Basic cable isn’t scrambled. You can plug in directly to your tv, no cable company needed. (Not with hdmi though.) But if they realize you’re doing this, they will drive out and disconnect the cable from your house at the street level.
The ability to get cable signals in the clear is on the decline, and completely gone in some systems. Cable companies have converted many channels to data rather than a regular signal. Connecting the cable straight to the TV may not work for any channels at all, even the basic cable ones. I think the driving force is to allow more data to go on the coax rather than to prevent people from stealing signal. By converting a normal channel to data, they get more bandwidth on the coax for internet data. So even if you can get some channels directly on your TV, that may eventually change. It just depends on your particular cable provider and how aggressive they are with channel conversion.
Yeah, that’s a fair point. I was talking about pre-digital cable, I now realize.
Also, @doreen, I never got to the point you were making about how vcrs used to be hooked up. That’s not entirely true, but could be if the person wanted it to be. (I definitely did not.)
If your hookup goes Wall => Cable Box => VCR => TV, then when you’re recording something, it will tie up the entire system. You can’t change the cable box channel because it needs to be there for the vcr to record it. This is wholly unhelpful for recording one thing while watching another, which was the entire point of early vcrs: Tape primetime on CBS while watching NBC (or whatever), and now for the first time ever you can watch both!
Most every vcr I ever set up used an A/B switch:
Wall => Splitter => VCR => A/B Switch . . . . => A => TV
. . . . . . . . . . . . .=> Cable Box => A/B Switch => B => TV
Now your vcr could record any basic cable channel on its own, because of the unscrambled basic cable tier I talked about earlier. No cable box required.
While the vcr was recording any basic cable show, at the same time you could watch whatever you wanted live on any cable channel, including HBO.
The only way you could record premium channels like HBO is putting the vcr after the cable box like you said, but that renders the tv unusable when the vcr is recording anything.
Then again, we’re talking about a dvr, not a vcr. If you go Wall => Cable Box => DVR => TV, then yeah, it doesn’t matter what channel the cable box is on because the DVR can drive everything to the tv without having to constantly rewind and change out vhs tapes.
But then how would the cable box know to change channels so the dvr can record the right channel? Or record 2 channels at once?
I remain confused.
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.
I’m sure you’ve reached this conclusion already, but satellite probably isn’t what you want to switch to. I’ve had Dish in three different houses, four different times (moved back to the first house after a couple of years out) over that last 15 years.
Between houses two and three, I moved back to house one. In the 5 years I had been gone, one of the oak trees grew large enough to interfere with the signal (all three satellites in our area were on the opposite side of the tree). My folks decided to switch to DirectTV, which has different satellite locations, but that might not always be an option, depending on how much sky is visible to you.
Yes, when the weather is particularly bad, you can lose the signal. In my first house with Dish the signal never went out, even during severe weather (until the tree grew, then it was spotty as hell). In my second and third houses, a severe thunderstorm or a moderate snowfall could block the signals. Not good when you are in a snowpocalypse and can’t get news that way.
I haven’t ever used Dish’s internet service, but I haven’t heard much good about it, and got the impression it’s for people who don’t have access to good internet service otherwise (think very rural areas). Maybe someone else can clarify that, since I don’t have first-hand knowledge,
You can attach an external HD to the Dish DVR through USB - although it’s in a proprietary format and can’t be watched separately from the DVR. I don’t know about DirectTV - my parents are nearly Luddites, and even if I asked, they wouldn’t know.
I love Dish network as a provider (except when they have disputes with the big networks).
What I didn’t love was paying a separate internet bill that cost as much as the Dish bill. We ended up canceling Dish and going with Comcast for the TV. With the internet/TV bundle, we pay less, but after two years, I still miss Dish.
I don’t know if you’d want to do this - but you can get HBO Max on the Firestick. I don’t know all the details( because my son-in-law did it for me) but you can’t just download the app from the Appstore. You have to allow apps from other sources, install an app called “Downloader” and then install the “HBO Max” app for Android
Now that you’ve mentioned an A/B switch, I did have one of those with my cable/VCR hookup. But I couldn’t watch one cable channel and record another- I could only watch broadcast TV using the TV tuner when I was recording another channel using the cable box tuner. ( because I have always needed a box for even basic cable )
Google “sideloading HBO” for steps on how to get HBO Max on the firestick.
I kind of wish I never upgraded to HD in the first place, which I didn’t do until 2015 or so. Up until around 2010 I was using two different VCRs in a complicated A/B setup that allowed me to tape 2 things at once while I watched a third, but only if 2 of those 3 things were on basic cable. Still, that was pretty impressive for a vcr setup.
One vcr only taped “dailies” (PTI, The Daily Show) while the other taped primetime stuff. The big drawback to vcrs is you generally have to watch them in order of when they were taped. So having PTI and The Daily Show clog up the middle of my Reaper / Lost / Big Bang Theory / etc… tapes felt out of place, so I added a second vcr. Premium cable I watched live.
I still have the last vcr tapes I was using, which include episode of Reaper. Reaper! Such a great show.
Anyway, if I had never upgraded to HD, I would be perfectly content to return to the literally-endless storage space of using vcrs as a makeshift dvr. Just buy more tapes any time you need more room.
Unfortunately, once you go HD you can’t go back to SD, or at least I can’t, so going back to vcrs isn’t an option. But I dearly wish it were and it would be if I never upgraded to HD. Gah!
How is xfinity? It appears I could switch to xfinity (Comcast) if they don’t suck. Do they suck?
(One 10-minute phone call later, yeah, I’m pretty sure Comcast sucks.)
I’m confused; you said in the OP that you have a cable subscription with HBO and Showtime premium channels but also have the option of switching to Comcast. What is your current cable company? I think it’s unusual to have more than one option for cable (although satellite, FIOS and Uverse are options in some places).
And yes, Comcast sucks. But so does every other cable and telecom company.
We have Cablevision, which has rebranded itself as Optimum. I’m guessing they want to distance themselves from the word “cable” now that we’re in the age of wireless.
Turns out that I can get internet from Comcast, but not cable. They support my zip code for cable, but despite being in almost the perfect geographic center of that zip code, no cable for us.