My DVD recorder hates me.

I try not to complain, really, but I think I just have to accept that my DVD recorder–a Samsung DVD-R135– hates me.

First, there’s the time thing. It’s consistently an hour off, no matter what I do. I can tell it the correct time zone, manually program the correct time, turn off the automatic time set feature, and do all of these things over and over again, but it doesn’t make any difference. Its clock ticks to its own drummer.

You may remember that I’ve tried to have this fixed. I sent the unit away to be repaired back when it was still under warranty. It was gone for four months, and when it came back, the clock was correct for several whole months … until the first time I had to adjust the time for Daylight Savings (don’t get me started on that subject), and ever since then?

Back to its own drummer.

The sad part is that it’s not even consistent about being wrong. It’s not, for example, constantly thinking that we’re on Central Time instead of Eastern Standard. It’s not using the old dates for Daylight Savings Time. It’s just always wrong. Except for rare days when, for some reason, it will suddenly be right for a few hours, or a day, or even a week … but the minute I start thinking it’s going to stay correct, it switches back.

What does this mean in daily life? Well, it still plays DVDs fine, so the time doesn’t matter for that. Since the clock is constantly showing the wrong time, though, it throws me off every time I glance at the television, so I keep it wastefully powered on all the time, so the screen shows the channel its tuned to rather than the clock. It DOES make recording television shows difficult, though … Sometimes I’ll set the timer according to its own, private time zone, only to have it record according to the real time. Or vice versa. But, you understand, this just adds to the fun.

Which brings us to this week.

I told you about CHESS in Concert the other night, and how much I’ve always loved the music. So, naturally, I wanted to record it, so–carefully accounting for the hour’s time difference between my bedroom and the DVD recorder–I set the timer.

I even planned ahead and set up some backup, by programming the VCR to record it on tape. This is a worst-case option, though, because CHESS in Concert is two had a half hours long. See, it’s possible to copy a VHS tape to DVD via the dual unit down in the family room, but it’s got an automatic two-hour limit. There’s no changing the speed of the DVD recording when dubbing, so two hours is IT … so any recording longer than 122 minutes is going to get cut off (which is NOT good television). So … while I could crawl around with cables and such to feed a VCR into one of the other DVD recorders … well, it’s not an easy process. But, still … backup is good.

Especially lately.

Because, guess what happened Wednesday night? Not the weird time thing, no. I set it to start recording at 7:00 its time and that actually worked. But … even though I set the DVD recorder to record in the LP setting–which should have given me four hours of recordable time–it recorded in SP, which means that two hours into the performance, it stopped recording. Argh!

And then, there’s the other glitch. We had a tiny but powerful power outage a couple weeks ago, and since then, if there’s a DVD in the tray, the machine keeps trying to, I don’t know, load it? Play it? Queue it? Something, anyway, that makes it periodically whirr, click, and clack. So that, when it stopped recording at 10:00 pm, it kept making these noises while I was trying to at least watch the rest of the show. And when I got up and tried to eject the tray? It wouldn’t open. I finally had to unplug the entire unit from the wall (which was fun in and of itself) to get it to shut up.

I did finally get the disk out, though, and when I found out CHESS in Concert was being aired again this morning at 1:00, I figured I would try again. I set the timer, made sure the recording speed was set to LP, and went to bed.

At a little after 5:00 this morning … click, whirr, clack …. silence … clack, whirr, click … pause … whirr, whirr, click …

Sigh.

Did I get out of bed to try to shut it up? No, I didn’t. I figured the effort of trying to outthink it (not to mention having to turn the bedroom light on to find the plug) would have woken me up more than the every-few-minutes-interrupted-sleep. But, still!

When I got up (a few minutes late, because for some reason I was tired this morning), I ejected the DVD–thankfully without any difficulty other than its taking about 3 minutes to process what “Open” meant. I got dressed, ate my breakfast, and when I went back upstairs to get ready for work, I was curious, so put the disk in and hit Play.

Yep. It recorded for three full hours BUT it started one hour into the performance. I forgot to adjust for the hour’s time difference when I set the timer.

But, the true, bitter irony?

After ejecting the disk and turning the power off to try to get the “Load error” message off the screen (because, of course it couldn’t load a disk, I took it out, stop trying!) … When I turned the power off?

It was magically showing the correct time.

I tell you, this machine is just messing with me now!

As much as I’d love to buy another DVD recorder and throw this one out the window, I’m stuck with it. But you know, there really are times I wish we had a DVR/Tivo like most other people in 2009 have.

Sigh.

I’ve got two more possibilities for getting this show onto DVD. (You know, other than actually buying the thing.) One is to convert my VCR backup, which is possible but involved. The other is to check the family room’s DVD recorder–it’s one of those DVR-wanna-be units. A DVD recorder with a hard-drive, so that while it doesn’t automatically record like Tivo does, you can record programs into its memory and then decide later if it’s worth burning it to disk. I set its timer last night also, with strict instructions to Mom to make sure the cable box was set to channel 13 before she came upstairs. I haven’t checked yet to see if that worked or not … she says that she did, and that machine is pretty reliable, but with all the rest of these difficulties … You’ll forgive me for being skeptical.

Maybe I should just stick with the CD of the album and give up on the video altogether?

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