Hello,

I was flicking through the Ruby Quizzes when I saw the VCR Program  
Manager (#101) -- and thought how nice it would be to control my  
(real) video recorder via Ruby rather than its native GUI.

http://www.rubyquiz.com/quiz101.html

Inevitably when I return from a holiday somewhere I find that I'm  
missing the final fifteen minutes of a favourite programme because  
the TV network changed the schedules after I left.  Of course you  
only find out you missed the last part once you've watched up to that  
point.  Grr!

With a Ruby interface I could set a daily cron job to check the TV  
schedules over the web and update the VCR if necessary.

So does anybody know of a neat way of interfacing to a VCR?  Ideally  
a cheap piece of electronics I could buy online...and no, a TiVo  
thingy doesn't count as cheap :)

Thanks!

Andy Stewart

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http://airbladesoftware.com