musings

I am told that my late grandfather had a ‘cat’s whisker’ radio which required painstaking tuning and complete silence from everyone else in the room so that he could hear the faint signal of the BBC Light Programme on headphones.

Sometimes I imagine being able to travel in time and show him some gee-whizz 21st century gadgets - or even some everyday technology we take for granted like colour TV. But today I imagined myself as grandfather talking to someone as yet unborn, describing to them the time consuming journey of discovery and frustration that is making a DVD from a saved programme.

Having got a file off the Humax and onto the PC, I have spent many hours with different software downloads trying to perform the not-so-simple task of saving a programme to DVD. Whack in a blank and drag-and-drop the file? You’re in the fantasy world of Star Trek if you think that’s all you would have to do.

I have tinkered about with freeware, downloaded files which you then need to hook up to Java in some way, and got nowhere. In the process I have drawn two conclusions: 1) TV recordings are quite complex beasts and 2) there is a gap in the market for an application to burn DVD’s with them. Oh and 3) life’s too short.

Actually there is a program which goes a long way to meeting my needs. It’s taken a lot of digging to discover it, and it’s not freeware but today, after producing quite a few coasters, I did manage to produce a working DVD with it. I’ll tell you more next time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 7:27 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.