Your VCR may not work so well with digital cable.
I still have analog cable, but the only use the VCR gets is for recording French language stuff off Radio-Canada that isn’t going to be available as a bittorrent download within twenty-four hours of broadcast. Otherwise, downloading offers much better video quality than VHS, and the bonus of no ads to skip through.
Sure, and why don’t I go back to horse-driven transport?
A few points that might be relevant.
Don’t confuse paying for cable with paying for the channel. The TV stations may or may not be generating revenue from being carried by the cable provider, and even if they are getting something, still need to generate revenue from commercials. Premium stations, such as The Movie Network in Canada, charge the cable/satellite providers a fee per subscriber, and have a revenue model tied directly to the number of viewers they have (in theory, obviating the need to carry paying commercials).
Recording with a VCR is not always an option, especially for those of us who watch predominately HD channels. A PVR is currently the only way to record high definition shows.
Those points made, who is your cable provider, featherlou? I have Rogers (and therefore the joke that is Scientific Atlanta hardware), perhaps the most hated carrier in Canada, and yet I have never noticed a program being blocked for licensing reasons.
It’s worked fine for the last several years with Digital cable.
Don’t it just suck?
So you’re setting a timer program to record from the auxiliary input, and then leaving your digital box tuned to the station you want to watch?
Or do you just mean that you are using your VCR to record an analog channel?
We are with Shaw.
lissener, I wish I’d seen your thread before we bought the stupid dvr. 
This brings up another point - we keep seeing the notices that tv’s going all digital next year. We are not ready for this. All I want is to watch a little tv, record the stuff that I miss while trying to have a life, and watch it later. I don’t need HD, I don’t need digital, I don’t need a 46 inch plasma screen mounted on my wall, but circumstances are conspiring to make me buy much more than I need or want just so I can watch a couple of programs each week. I am getting frustrated by the whole situation (and feeling like I should add, “You damn kids get your digital tv off my lawn!”).
If you already have cable, then I don’t think you’ll experience any problems or changes with TV going all digital next year… Isn’t that a key point in the notices?
It’s only if you use rabbit-ears that you might need to worry.
IMHO Comparing a PVR to a VCR is about like comparing a graphing calculator to a laptop.
Not only that but what do you do if there’s different shows on different channels that you want to record while you’re at work? Do you just go “sorry guise gotta stop the factory for half an hour so I can go home and change the cable box channel”?
Not only that but some folks these days don’t even have tvs. I only have an OTA digital turner usb stick. I have it setup so I can stream tv to my laptop from desktop. Wherre do you wire vcr into that?
Bottom line for me is this: If the sons of bitches don’t want us watching their stupid shows at our convenience when every fucking show we have any interest in is shown at exactly the same time so we can’t see everything live, then fuck 'em. They lose us as viewers, which means they lose us as potential buyers of the crappy products on their crappy commercials. 
The ubiquitous messages are misleading. Cable customers have no concern about over-the-air signals, and those are the ones you are being warned about.
However, cable companies are gradually converting to all-digital for many reasons. One is they can charge more for customers who thought they could get by with only basic charges. If they move the basic channels into the digital-only realm (>channel 112) then they can get the customers to pay for what they used to get for free. Charter is doing that to us.
You just have to make sure your TV has a digital tuner, which it might. You don’t have to go buy an HDTV just to get a digital tuner.
I’m curious though. featherlou, you’re in Canada right? Why is Canada going digital at the same time as the US? Does the FCC really push you guys around, or did the UN tell the whole world to go digital at the same time, or what?
No, Canada isn’t going digital next year and won’t for a few years. According to the digital television entry in Wikipedia:
Note, though, that many Canadians are confused about this–we get US channels on cable, including their screen crawlers and so on that tell us about February 2009. Especially since our own channels are making no effort to tell us “Ignore the digital date on US channels,” or “If you have cable, you don’t need to worry,” it’s easy to see why so many Canadians are mistaken as to the date of the digital TV switchover in Canada.
But DVRs are used to skip the commercials anyway, right? So the channels really have no reason to care whether DVR users watch or not.
Consumers who don’t watch ads are already pretty much doing the equivalent of downloading the programs anyway, aren’t they?
Yep.
I hardly ever use rabbit ears. Usually just a French maid outfit.
Well, I’ll point out my method might be “so last decade” but it works- and the OP’s doesn’t.
Well, we certainly fast forward through them all, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t exposed at least a little bit. I would be stunned if the marketers aren’t aware of this and haven’t ensured that their commercials’ messages can’t be transmitted at a very rapid rate of speed. Take us off the TV watchers list and they don’t even get that little bit of ad influence.
What program are you trying to record? Since I live in the same city with the same cable provider and likely the same pvr perhaps we can eliminate possibility of a faulty pvr.