Channeling Patience in Digital Disconnect

This is a tale of couch-potato woe.

It began when I called my cable TV company to order cable with HBO. But the cable lady said I could get HBO only with digital cable service. Though I didn’t have any theological objections to this arrangement, I was a little concerned about the compatibility of the digital cable box with a VCR.

The cable company--I live in Santa Monica, which is served by Adelphia--was not a lot of help.

Some employees told me the system was fully compatible with VCRs. It isn’t.

Others told me that VCRs just won’t work at all with the digital system. That’s not true either.

And nobody--not the cable company, not the digital equipment distributor, not VCR manufacturers--could provide a straight answer about precisely what sort of equipment would let me do what I wanted: tape multiple channels while I’m away from my shows.

Aargh! This is the kind of thing that drives people into a frothing rage. We’ve made substantial investments in our consumer electronics, and some company arbitrarily announces that your expensive components are worthless because they’ve changed the rules. Most of the time, consumers are forced to just smile and swallow hard.

I tape nearly all the TV I watch, which is about half a dozen shows a week. I have two VCRs for this task, including my venerable SuperBetamax HiFi, because on occasion two programs I want to see air opposite each other.

Watching mostly taped TV means I get to watch the good stuff when I want, which is well worth the unintended humiliation that results whenever I see Tom Green on a live broadcast and futilely mash the fast-forward button. By the time I realize my mistake and start fumbling for the ice pick to gouge out my eyes and puncture my eardrums, he’s usually gone.

All my equipment is what’s known as cable-ready, meaning it doesn’t need any kind of cable box to record or watch regular cable broadcasts, although a box is required to watch a premium channel such as HBO. This was a problem for me for years until cable companies introduced VCRs with a little doodad that sits in front of the cable box and lets the VCR change channels on the cable box. This led to TV nirvana: what I wanted, when I wanted it.

But my carefully constructed world of home entertainment has come crashing down.

The problem with most digital cable systems--including Adelphia’s in Santa Monica--is that the cable box can’t be controlled with a VCR. As far as I know, no manufacturer makes a VCR on the shelf today that will change the channels on the digital cable box.

There is a partial solution to this problem. But the folks at Adelphia, while cheerfully willing to supply me with misinformation, don’t like to talk about it.

The cable that comes out of the wall actually carries both standard analog television signals and digital signals that can be seen only using the converter box. If you split that cable in front of the cable box and put one feed into your VCR, you can record all the analog channels and watch the digital channels, which include all the premium broadcasts, such as HBO.

You can’t record premium channels, but you can record nearly all the other channels.

This isn’t exactly a great solution since the only real appeal of digital cable is that it offers multiple feeds of the premium channels, such as HBO East and HBO West.

What’s the point of having digital if you can’t record those multiple channels? Out of town when “The Sopranos” airs a new episode? Too bad, pal. Mooch a copy from a friend whose neighborhood has not yet switched to the wonders of digital.

I considered getting a satellite system, but that wasn’t really a practical solution for me in my rented apartment, much as I’d like to stick it to Adelphia.

After months of beating my head against the wall on this, I broke down and had digital cable installed and bought a TiVo player. TiVo is kind of like a VCR crossed with a computer; it digitally records TV broadcasts on a hard drive.

I’m not especially interested in that capability since my VCRs work quite nicely, thank you. But I was very excited when I was told that Ti Vo could change channels on the digital cable box. I got the thing set up, and it does indeed work reasonably well with the cable box.

So you’d think I’d be happy that I’ve cut this high-tech version of the Gordian Knot. But I’m still pretty steamed.

It’s cost me $400 to recover a basic function offered by my extremely inexpensive VCRs and an analog cable system. And I never did get a straight answer about how the technology works from the people interested in shoving it down my throat.

What’s a Betamax worth these days?

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Dave Wilson is The Times’ personal technology columnist.