This is a moronic argument, Mr.Mitchell.

*nsfw

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Holy crap David, you've completely lost me here sir, COMPLETELY.

You SO do not want to go back to video tapes, and the increasingly fuzzy picture the more you watch it, the inability to skip to the part you want quickly.

Taping TV required having a damn library of tapes and a book where you'd write down what was on each tape so you could find it again... compared to now when you tell your Tivo to do it and it does.


He's obviously run out of real things to complain about, because this made no sense at all.

Excuse me while I go and watch a Blu Ray on my widescreen tv Mr Mitchell.

Yeah, I think he's talking about people like you, Spoco.

I'm with him all the way.

He had me at the remote with hundreds of buttons. God I hate those things. Give me channels, volume and mute, and I'm happy.

Well he's talking about VCRs, and your dream remote won't PLAY anything.

I watched a movie a year ago on VHS after watching it on Netflix streaming. 4:3 picture, poor audio quality, "tracking", whatever the hell that was. Let's be honest, VHS was serious crap.

DVDs were better, hands down.

You know what's even better? Movies on my hard drive.

Arguing against DVDs is like arguing against CDs or laserdiscs. Nobody cares anymore.>> ^kymbos:

Yeah, I think he's talking about people like you, Spoco.
I'm with him all the way.
He had me at the remote with hundreds of buttons. God I hate those things. Give me channels, volume and mute, and I'm happy.

>> ^kymbos:

Yeah, I think he's talking about people like you, Spoco.
I'm with him all the way.
He had me at the remote with hundreds of buttons. God I hate those things. Give me channels, volume and mute, and I'm happy.


Uh, but wait, he says that he wishes VHS was back. Are you trying to tell me that a VCR was easier to operate than a Tivo? How many people did you know that had no friggen clue how to set up a recording to happen in the future? Yeah, they were stupidly difficult to use.

Tivo... looking through program guide, ooh, I like that, button pressed, job done.

Other PVRs same thing really... I don't actually have a Tivo (wish I did), but my PVR is almost as easy... go through guide, see show, press record, press it again if you want it to record it weekly.

Seriously, he's clutching at straws for things to whinge about now, and has some serious rose tinted glasses on about how good VHS was to use, it was shit. Analogue is shit.

I have a lot of DVDs, and 4 kids under 8 years old.... ALL of my DVDs still work, no scratches.

He's making shit up.

It's a pity, because I love most of his stuff, but I think he's finding himself backed into a corner of having to live up to an image of him being about to rant about things really well, but having run out of things to rant about.

*british

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I think what he's generally getting at is that with technological advancement there's a trade off between the benefits of the previous approach, and the benefits of the new stuff. He's saying that the benefits of the new stuff don't really appeal to him - things like picture quality. He didn't care that the VHS picture quality was crap, because he could rely on sticking the little box in the bigger box and hitting play, which was all he wanted.

Personally, I have never been exposed to Tivo, although I know what it is. That whole thing of trying to make tv more accessable just seems redundant to me, because I can bypass it all with illegal downloads, and watch whatever I want when I want, with the trade-off of pretty crap quality. I couldn't care less about tivo, surround sound blah blah and blu-ray whatsits. If I had the patience to learn how to hook my laptop up to my telly I'd be stoked, but I'd still be watching crap quality stuff, now on a big screen.

Oh, and I hate cds and dvds. I lose the discs, lend them to people and never get them back, scratch them etc. He's not making up that discs get scratched.

Remote controls have gotten seriously fucked up. I counted over 70 buttons on my friend's TV remote a while back. Why are there so many fucking buttons? People complain about computer interfaces all the time but even the worst of them are so much better than any remote control I've seen in the last 5 years.

Remote controls are for wimps. I use a keyboard and mouse. I am typing this on my TV right now. That's right, HTPC, Home Theater PC. 52" widescreen HDTV, and all the content I can stream or download. Quality is about DVD level if you get the 350MB per 45 min episode versions. Most movies you can find at 720p, and some even full 1080p, though that's mostly a waste of time and disk space.

Discs, tapes, vinyl... it's all passé.

This is exactly a soliloquy spoken by a man who just got in an argument with his printer.

We've all been there before. I'm sure Mr. Mitchell will recover from his brief bout of tech-insanity when he cathartically throws his printer out his window.

This was a much better rant about the bullshit surrounding DVDs:
http://videosift.com/video/You-know-what-s-bullshit-DVDs

David Mitchell is one of my favourite british comedians, but this one was a bit trite

He's missing the distinction between technology and design.

DVD is a far superior technology to VHS, be it visual quality, content searching, storage density, or pretty much anything.

What he is complaining about is design, and it's a valid point. Incomprehensible remotes and unresponsive printers are terribly designed. That isn't the fault of improved tech though, it's the result of lazy designers focusing on fitting in more features than making a usable product.

*electronica is for music.

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