I have purchased a device to record television shows. But this device does not have a tuner. So it only sees channel three. That makes this thing a lot less practical than I planned. I have been using a VCR to force different shows into channel three but I then also have to record the shows on the VCR tape and the tape fills up long before the SD cards. Once the tape fills up, the VCR shuts off and I get no signal to the new recording device.
So the question is Do they sell endless loops for VCR taping? Or, if I take the tape out of the body of a VCR tape, can I make the machine think it is still recording even though no tape is moving. Or are there any better ideas out there?
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How do you have this routed? Rabbit ears or TV cable to RF In on the VCR, then RF Out on the VCR to the recording device? And if that¹s the routing, how are you getting any signal at all? Television has been all digital since last year. I would buy a digital TV converter box and use that.
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By digital cable box do you mean the things we got the 40 dollar coupons for last year? I have lots of those but their output is only channel three and if I want to tape 2.5 men and then lost, I will have to remember to move the channel on the digital box.
Right now, I have a cable coax into the input of a VCR. And the recording device connected to the RCA video out on the VCR. As long as the VCR is turned on, the RCA video out will feed the SD recording device. But this device always has to be on channel three. That is the total waste – the thing has a command to scan all the channels and set times all over the place but all it will ever find is channel three and that only when the VCR is turned on.
What I need is the old cable box that I had ten years ago that would actually tune itself and send everything into the tele on channel three but I don’t know if they even make such a thing anymore.
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There are certainly lots of these on eBay, but I’m not sure how they help you. They don’t have a timer, so you’d need to be there to change the channel yourself?
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Like you said there are lots of them and I would have to check them all to see if they will “self tune”. The first cable box that was installed here acted like a VCR. You could tell it to watch channel Oprah at 4 and then switch to channel A Team at 11. The neatest part was the turn off function. I got tired of telling my fine children to turn off the set before they fell asleep only to be ignored. So the boxes that that kids had shut down every 8 minutes after 9 o’clock. Since they did not have remotes – somehow the kids remotes got lost – the poor children had to move their butts every 8. If I had an item like that, I could put the SD recorder to a much better use.