I missed taping episode 6 of Six Feet Under on Wednesday. I’ve been faithfully taping since HBO started repeating the first season. A couple of my friends that don’t have HBO want to watch it, and I wanted a copy for myself anyway. I knew I could tape it tonight at 10pm because it repeats on HBO Plus on Saturday nights. Then I realize my VCR is only setup to tape regular cable, not digital cable, which means I can tape HBO but not HBO Plus. Crap.
After examining the existing setup and musing on it a while, I think I can change things around so that I can tape both regular and digital cable. Why not, I might want to tape shows off of digital cable in the future anyway. So, after several hours of confusion and frustration involving splitters and A/B switches, I finally got it to work! Then I sit down with my dinner and write down what I did for future reference. Yes, it’s that complex.
Now I’m ready to tape episode six. I pop the tape in and push record precisely at 10pm, feeling quite pleased with myself. Episodes one through five are already on the six-hour capacity tape, just enough room left for episode six. After 30 minutes, the tape stops, rewinds itself and ejects. WTF?!? What is going on? There was definitely room on the tape, why did it quit taping? I look at the VCR and realize that I hadn’t changed the record speed to EP (slow). I’d left it on SP (fast) and it used up the remaining tape too quickly. Aaaaargghhh.