So I broke down and went out and bought the Toshiba RD-XS53 HDD/DVD Recorder. That’s the (supposedly) TiVo-like machine which works with SkyPerfecTV (which I just got), recording whatever you like and doing all the programming work for you. Or not.

In order to get enough time to set up the gadgets that I buy, I usually get them Friday evening on the way home from work, or on Saturday afternoon (like this time); that’ll leave me the weekend, before I have to go back to work, to fiddle with the thing and get it just right.

And every time I seem to forget what happens every time before–the manual is frustratingly confusing, and the 24/7 telephone number is for pre-sales only–tech support won’t open till Monday at 10 am, by which time I have to go to work. Yargh.

One of the main features–and they advertise the spit out of the machine as having this very feature–is that it can control the SkyP tuner box through a control cable, turning it on and off, changing the channel, switching the bilingual mode. But just try getting it to do that. The “easy setup” manual is unforgivably lacking in detail–it only explains a portion of what you have to do before you can even do the most basic of tasks–and in order to get things to work right, you have to reference the thicker manual, without prompting from the “easy setup,” and, well, you get the picture. I could rant on, but I doubt you’d want to read about it.

Short story: I have figured out enough after a few hours of reading, fixing the settings, arranging the channels manually and so on, to get the thing to simply record whatever I manually set it to. Which will hold me, I suppose, until the tech support people come in from the weekend.

Spiffy features I hadn’t known about: you can divide any recorded show into DVD chapters, and delete any chapter you want–which can be used to separate out and then delete commercial breaks, if you want to take the time to do that. That I could figure out, though I wouldn’t even have known about it except that the Yodobashi Camera sales guy showed it to me. Another nifty feature is the ability to manually set the compression. Instead of just having “regular” (4.6) or “long” (3.2), you can set the quality from 1 to almost 10, so a DVD could hold anywhere from 1 to 8 hours of programming, depending on the quality you select. My current task is to figure out how much DVD play time is added by going up or down each step in compression so I can set the quality just right for X amount of video to fill up a disk.

One drawback: the DVD recorder will produce only Region-2 DVDs, so if you want to send homemade DVDs–even self-made things, like home movies–to anyone outside Japan, they’ll need a region-free DVD player to view them. And there is copy-protection, so you can’t just pop in a rental DVD, save it to disk, then record back onto a DVD-R (unless you have a pirate box that defeats the DVD protection).

I’m sure there are quite a few other ups and downs to come… And if anyone in the U.S. is interested in this kind of a machine, it’ll be released there next month, at about $700. I presume it’ll be geared to hook up to American satellite systems, and will probably have equivalent features.