Wed, Feb 19, 2025 at 09:46:49AM +0100, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
However, there are also advantages to being able to record films and series under your own control without being exposed to the risk that they will disappear from the online offering at some point.
Not only that. While the modern TVs reach their planned obsolescence every 10 or so years, VDR keeps working with the same original remote control from more than 20 years ago, even though all other hardware has been replaced. I enjoy the same familiar user interface with not many quirks.
Actually, I would think that we are past the peak quality of TV sets by now. To name an example: At my place, the DVB-T2 reception is pretty bad whenever the outside temperature drops below freezing. My decade-old 22" Samsung "smart" TV handles this very well, I would say sometimes even better than rpihddevice, which occasionally would lose the audio until the channel is changed. I recently got for free a roughly 5-year-old Panasonic. For any small glitch, it would blank the screen for several seconds. It also loves to interrupt the audio and video when I open the EPG, which is much clumsier to navigate than the VDR equivalent. Both "smart" TVs would support recording to an attached USB device, but at least the Samsung adds some stupid encryption. No thanks, I want to own my data, and VDR only changed its format once, in a compatible way.
Okay, for some streaming needs it could be easiest to avoid VDR and simply attach another tiny Linux "desktop" device to another HDMI input, to avoid a dependency on proprietary devices that would stop working when some cloud service is updated every 5 to 10 years.
I wish all VDR users continued enjoyment with it!
Thank you for your great support! Marko
