Alternatives to my always full DVR
Kate and I rarely have time to watch television in the evenings. We both work full time jobs and after work between the gym, Kate’s MBA classes, my poker nights and us still having to find time to do household chores we get about an hour a night to watch TV.
Optimizing our time is important and ever since we purchased our first DVR in 2003 we’ve enjoyed being able to save time by fast forwarding commercials. However now that we’ve gone to HD television we’ve run into a problem. The DVR provided by Comcast just doesn’t have enough space! We’re constantly at over 90% filled and cheer when we make it into the low 70s. However it will never stay in that range long.
We’ve lost numerous episodes of television shows because the DVR fills and has to either delete something or not record something. It’s really getting tiresome and I’ve started to seek alternatives to recording everything on my DVR.
First I decided to try the 100% legitimate way of watching TV and I decided to make use of the Hulu (http://www.hulu.com) website. Hulu offers a wonderful service offering television shows by participating networks in your web browser. It offers a SD resolution of 360p and some programs you can rock out on HD at 480p. The 480p seems pretty good to me within the window however I notice that in a full screen display they’ll tend to be sluggish. This could be a result of my over three year old laptop but I have no other way to test it as Kate and I have exactly matching laptops.
Thanks to Hulu I no longer need to record my animated shows like “Family Guy” and “King of the Hill” and the crappy TV series I enjoy because I truly am my sons father such as “Knight Rider”. However when I went to add other shows to my subscription list I ran into an issue. Shows such as “Scrubs” and “How I Met Your Mother” are not directly hosted on the Hulu site and instead it links you back to the networks own site with their own modified flash video player. The problem with that being for some reason I am not getting the content. Nor am I sure that my Hulu subscription will properly notify me when these sites update their content.
As of this moment no matter what I try I can not get the episodes directly linked form the Hulu site to play on my machine. Yes, I know that most people are too nearsighted to realize that not everybody runs Windows and Internet Explorer so us poor Mac users suffer. I just don’t think that should be a valid excuse for not being able to play video from a NATIONAL network broadcasting service. Poor showing.
Hopefully I can figure this out and Hulu can work for my needs letting me only record the things we both watch on the DVR which currently has four things scheduled for the next two days with 14% free. Those four items are NOT going to fit thus forcing us to loose episodes we can’t possibly watch as Kate wont even be home until tomorrow evening.
Originally posted at The WaxNation. Please leave any comments there. Posts on The WaxNation are written by either Kate or Dave Waxman; however livejournal can not display the author details thus to determine its author you must visit the original post.