I used to cross-stitch while I watched mediocre television. I could keep my eyes mostly on my work, with only an occasional glance at the screen to follow the action.
Now that I have a DVR, I have hours of great movies and quality TV shows queued up, so I never watch anything that I’m not fully engaged in. Therefore, I am not getting any work done on my cross-stitch projects.
I feel your pain!!
I’ve been a Tivo user for almost 2 years now, and life is definitely not the same. If I need to actually get any work done, I’ll turn on the radio. My TV watching has become so efficient that I now have more time to listen to radio than ever before.
I learned when the kids were born to listen to the TV and watch it once in a while more than staring at it. So I quilt to movies on DVD. If I had a DVR, I’d do that too.
But then, quilting takes a little less brain engagement than cross-stitch.
I read your post to Mrs. Bricker, who recommends you learn crochet … you can do that with much less need to keep your eyes on the work. It’s perfect for TV watching!
I was going to recommend knitting for the same reason. I can watch movies and knit at the same time with no problem, at least until I have to pick up stitches and bind off. I have to pay attention there. But long stretches of stockinette are very relaxing to do and help me feel like I’m not just wasting time in front of a passive entertainment source.
It’s well worth learning to knit without watching your hands. Then you can knit and read books at the same time. You just need a bookstand to hold the book. I like this one from Levenger: Book Hug. If you order more than one, they’re only $8 each, which is an incredible value. I have one for holding cookbooks in the kitchen, and one for holding books while I knit, and I’ve also given a gazillion as gifts. They’re so darn handy and everyone loves them.
Regarding DVRs, I record nature shows, cooking shows, some sitcoms, etc. that I like. They aren’t flat-out bad TV, but they don’t require a lot of attention, so I can do something else while I watch them. I have them set up as “channels” on my ReplayTV,
so it keeps an hour or so, and just automatically discards the old stuff when it records new.
Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll have to give crochet or knitting a try, if I ever get done with my existing projects. I read a lot, so the idea of knitting while reading is intriguing.
Give up the DVR and watch your shows when they are on.
If you look a little closer at the quality of the DVR image you’ll see that it’s horrendous. The image is greatly compressed to fit hours and hours on one drive.
The networks are shifting over to servers which do the same thing already so the compression is at least doubled. And their sneakily passing this off on the viewing public. Part of the push for HD is actually not so much for fantasic HD imaging, but to get away with more image compression.
So you might just find time for knitting again.
Yep, I’m doing hardanger embroidery for the first time. And there are shows that I can do that in front of, but if I’m engaged in the show, I have to knit.
No, I cannot just sit and do nothing. It doesn’t work that way.
I don’t know if you’re being serious or not, but the picture quality on my TiVo (set to medium) is almost indistinguishable from live TV, and only becomes visibly artifacted when there’s a sudden change in the image, which isn’t often on my shows. This tiny artifacting in no way outweighs all the advantages I experience with the TiVo.
Seriously, whenever I’m in a place without a TiVo, I lose my mind having to watch whatever’s on TV. It seems so primitive and outdated. </hijack>
Agreed. He must have a DVR other than Tivo. I have the Tivo / DirecTV unit, and it is completely indistinguishable from live TV. A friend of mine has the Time Warner DVR and he complains about the quality.
Yeah, it must be his machine. I just got a 32" flat screen HD, and my Dish DVR plays back stuff I’ve recorded with jaw-dropping clarity. I also wake up at 2:30AM, so I never get to watch anything live after 6PM. I’d be totally screwed if I didn’t TiFaux *everything[/] I want to see.
Maybe since I work in the biz my vision is overly sensitive. The layperson isn’t going to catch the difference. And that’s what the broadcasters are counting on.
Well, for SiouxChief and singular1, the images their DVRs record are identical to live TV. The Dish DVR and DirecTV TiVo just copy the incoming MPEG stream from the satellite to the hard drive of the device. For them, there is no further compression.
For my cable-source TiVo, the MPEG encoder has to encode in real-time, without the benefit of hand-selected keyframes. As a result, it can get choppy (really choppy) when there’s a bunch of fast action, and some artifacting around titles and such on the screen. If I were to set it on Best (instead of Medium), I wouldn’t see any of this; however, my recording time would drop from ~80 hours to ~40. On Basic, it’s capable of recording ~140 hours and looking like hell, but this seemed a good trade-off. Besides, there’s not a lot of fast action in the few sitcoms, the 4000 hours a day of Law and Order, and bad sci-fi movies and series I record.
If you live with a TiVo, you honestly tend to get to the point where you need it. If I didn’t have a TiVo, I’m not sure I’d even subscribe to cable. Getting rid of the thing would be unthinkable at this point.
No one who has seen Discovery HD’s** Sunrise Earth **recorded on a HD TiVo and played on a Samsung 51’ DLP HD would say the image is ‘horrendous.’ The words I use to describe it are along the lines of amazing, jaw-dropping, and* gorgeous.* **Sunrise Earth ** is an hour-long program of the sunrise filmed in places such Yosemite, a lobster village in Maine, or the geysers in Yellowstone. No human narration at all. The only sounds you hear are the wind, birds, water, or insects that were there that morning. It’s breathtaking. And it’s on TV every day! Whee!
Read a review of Sunrise Earth here.
To the OP - I used to cross-stich, but then, with time, my eyesight changed. It takes longer for my eyes to change focus from close work to looking across the room. I had to mention this so my post wouldn’t seem like a total hijack.