Ohio State vs. Iowa.
Ivylad is not feeling well enough to sit up, so he’s watching the game in the bedroom.
I have stuff recorded on that VCR that I haven’t watched yet, so I can’t record the game. Why do I have to record the game? Because somehow Ivylad has managed to suck our 14 year old daughter into this OSU football fetish, she’s away on a school trip, and I have to record the game for her. On the TV in the living room.
Is football season over yet?
Every VCR I know of has a TV/VCR button on it that allows you to use the VCR tuner to tape a program and the TV button returns viewing control to your TV tuner, so you can watch something else at the same time. Doesn’t yours have such a button, on the front panel or the remote, or both?
My current cable box will digitally record a channel that I’m not watching. But up at the house I could only record (on the VCR) the channel on the cable box. I could not watch any channel on the TV without the cable box.
I did ask the cable company if I could watch one channel while recording another. They said sure; I’d just have to rent another cable box. :rolleyes:
That’s not the way the VCRs are set up. And I don’t think Ivylad and Ivygirl would appreciate it if I start messing with the settings now.
I suppose it depends on how you have your devices wired up. Normally, the cable goes into the back of the VCR, and a shorter cable goes from the VCR to the TV. With the TV on channel 3, you can watch and record, for instance, the game, from the VCR tuner. With the TV/VCR button engaged, you are then viewing channel 3 off the TV, and can then watch any other channel on the TV while the VCR records the channel you have it set on. A cable box adds another layer of complication for this purpose. But most equipment is designed to let you tape one and watch another - otherwise it’d be a huge inconvenience, wouldn’t it?
Do you not have a VCR in the bedroom? You could record the game as it’s being watched by Ivylad and the TV in the living room would be yours, all yours.
I do, but there’s shows on the tape I haven’t watched and there’s not enough tape left to record the game.
Besides, I get to listen to Ivylad yelling at the incompetent Iowa referees who are obviously biased. 
My cable box was wired (coax) to the VCR, and the VCR went to the TV. Whether or not the VCR was turned on, the TV had to be on channel 3 in order to pick up the cable signal. This was true whether the cable went to the VCR first, or to the TV alone. Channels were changed using the cable box, and not the TV. Again, I asked the cable company, and they told me that the only way to watch one channel and record another was to have two cable boxes. (Perhaps they changed that when they went to digital, but I don’t know.)
Dad and I had cable in the '70s, and a cable box was not required. The cable went directly into the back of the TV. The only time you needed a box was if you wanted premium channels. (But ‘modern’ TVs in the late-1970s/early-1980s had ‘fine tuning’ so that you could find the premium channels without having a box. 
)
You know, there’s a really simple solution: Keep a couple of extra tapes on hand for just such emergencies.