The State of Recoding Television

As short as a few years ago, TVs could internally handle the two main signals that they received, which were either an analog cable signal or over the air TV transmissions. Now that we have digital satellite (DSS), and digital cable, and High-Definition TV (HDTV) technologies, things have all changed.

With all these new technologies, it means that making the correct component choices the first time is critical so that everything works together. This also means, that the equipment setup will now become more complex.

For example, lets say that you want to get a new HDTV, with a HDTV satellite receiver, a Tivo PVR, and a Gateway Connected DVD player. The first thing that you need to consider is the HDTV monitor that you want to buy, some of these monitors require the purchase of an additional receiver. Then if you want to record your HDTV programming, you will need a PVR that can record this signal. DirecTV and Tivo are suppose to have a satellite HDTV receiver with that can do this (although, all I could find was press release about it 'coming soon').

Then once you have the TV, PVR, and HDTV receiver selected, you now you consider which DVD player you want. I personally like the idea of the Gateway connected DVD player because of it's feature set.

Hooking It All Together:
Hopefully when you bought your TV you had enough forethought to buy one with extra video connectors to handle hooking up all these different components. If that wasn't enough to worry about, you also need to consider which video/audio connections (such as: Composite, RCA, Component, and S-Video) each of devices use, and which will give you the best picture quality.

Then there's the other devices that we hook up to our TVs, such as:
- Camcorders
- Game consoles
- Home theater systems
- etc..

The Future:
As more entertainment devices are being developed, hooking all these components together is going to become a worse nightmare. The manufactures need to rally together to standardize one connection type, that allows you daisy chain the devices together. These devices also need to allow one device to become the master of the chain so that when you press the play button you don't have to set each device's video selection mode to allow that device to play through to the TV.

For example, if you have an older TV that only has two video inputs, and you have a VCR, and a DVR player. When you want to play the DVD, you first have to switch the video input on the TV so that it will display the video output of the DVD player. Then you can can press the play button on your DVD player to watch your movie. It would would be nice if you just pressed play button on the DVD player, and the player communicated with the TV that it need to switch the video inputs.

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