Andrew was talking about watching the telly and it made me think about how much has changed so quickly. When I first met Rae we were still using VHS tapes, torrenting wasn’t around and DVDs of television shows were just taking off. When we were married we put some of our gift money towards buying a Sony HD recorder, which was pretty shmick at the time. We bypassed DVD only recorders but this model had a DVD recorder as well the hard drive. It has a single analogue tuner in it so we plugged in a set top box to record digital broadcasts.
Now 40 or so months later that seems almost prehistoric.
We’ve added an LCD telly with built in HD tuner. To that we’ve connected a silent PC with a television card. We can record HD telly on that using Windows Media Centre, one of the many stellar reasons to update to Windows 7. As we’ve got Windows 7 on my main PC and the laptops things get really interesting – you can watch your recorded shows on any PC connected to the network so if we want to watch something in the evening we can just flick on a laptop in bed and stream it over the wireless network. Off on a trip? No problem, make a copy of the show on your laptop by clicking ‘Copy’ and there you go. As I’ve got a card in my main PC we can record there as well.
Now all we need is a media server and a blu-ray drive for the PC and perhaps a better video card….and I had better stop now as I can see Rae shaking her head and pointing to the bank balance when she eventually reads this.
It’s amazing how far we’ve come, makes your head spin when you wonder where we’ll be in a few more years.