For the longest time, a most glorious time, the way I copied a TV show or movie to DVD from my TiVo unit was to pop a blank DVD into the TiVo unit and follow the on-screen directions. We had a TiVo unit from Humax that had a DVD player/burner right in it. It was a thing of beauty we took for granted until recently.

We would go to "Now Playing List", then to the the show we wanted to burn. When we would highlight the show, we would have the option "Save to DVD or VCR", and we would choose "DVD". We would then have the option of recording either that show alone or to add other shows to the disk. If we chose to include other shows, a checklist of everything we had on TiVo would be populated. We could then put a check mark next to all the shows we wanted to record until there was no more room on the disk, at which point the remaining shows on the list would be 'x'ed out.

Then, one day.... one tragic day, my wife put in a DVD to watch and the unit started to reboot. This happened a few times and then we called Humax. They walked us through some troubleshooting but we just could not put in any kind of disk without the unit rebooting. We contacted Humax again to find out about warranty information and what we would have to do to get a replacement or to get this unit fixed. We were told that TiVo units that burn disks were no longer manufactured. Humax was the only company that made them and the whiners in Hollywood decided they were not taking enough of our money with $9 movies and $6 popcorn and forced Humax to stop making these exceedingly convenient-to-the consumer marvels of technology.

This answered the burning question that had been plaguing my wife and me from a few months back: Why could we not find another TiVo recorder, not even from TiVo.com, when we were trying to find one for my sister for Christmas?

Another beautiful thing about the Humax TiVo recorder was that we would shoot home movies and would then plug the video camera into the recorder and burn disks of them. Now we will have to find out, perhaps from our neighbors on this very channel, how to get those home movies, as well as our shows from TiVo, burned to disks.

Better yet, let's all tell George Clooney, Whoopi Goldberg, and their associates that they need to learn to live with their $100,000,000 annual salaries and let us $35,000 per year simple folks have our little pleasures.

Learn more about this author, Michael J Link.
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