When Will TVs
have computers in them?

T   
he TV tuner I use for my setup is on the fritz. The "jump" button no longer works. Since this is the one I use the most ... I have to go to the "pack" again and select a tuner that does work. All this is so unnecessary. Why don't they just take a page from the computer industry and do the "Plug & Play" thing?

Here's what I mean

The TV is the central monstosity (except when you just want to listen to CD music). Everything hooks into it at the back ... or ... the front. Why not give the TV the capacity to recognize whatever is plugged into it? Just like Windows XP and every other OS. The TV only needs the computing power of a handheld calculator. It does require maybe a gig or two of hardrive ... but ... a TV should have that anyway for quick recording. We could use some of that.

Now, when you turn on your TV it runs it's POST program and sees everything that's attached to it. What it is ... the manufacturer ... the model. It looks up that info and loads it from the hardrive into ram memory. Now, it's ready to do your bidding.

Instead of having a remote for every toy connected to it, you just use the TV remote. All the basic buttons like Volume, Channel, Recall, Play, Pause, etc. are in raised mechanical (and robust) buttons that you can feel. All the special buttons that go with individual toys are in touch sensitive LCD display.

Now, when you want to do something like ... watch a movie ... you can program your defaults for doing that and the TV will turn on the things you need ... and ...

Remember what it has done
for the entire viewing session

Why remember?

So that you can look at other things and go back to the movie without having to reselect the DVD and a different input (like Input #1, Input #3, etc.). Rather, you just hit my new button ... the BACK button ... or the FORWARD button. Revolutionary, eh? You only have one good controller ... not fifteen controllers in a rack ... somewhere. When you hit "Back" and it gets to the DVD player, the controller automatically puts up the DVD player controls on the tuner that you're holding. All done in the background with just a little computing power.

Of course, your TV will have a telephone connection when you want to upgrade the hardrive info if you've bought something that didn't exist at the time the TV was purchased.

In addition to Back and Forward buttons I would like to have a button

"Record What I'm Watching Right Now"
button. No fumbling for controllers to ...
"Hurry up and record that before it's over"
The TV computer would just know what to connect to what automatically. Well, you say, maybe you want to record it to VCR or DVD+R or DVR or VCR2? Well, you would program a default option and secondary option and so on. Thus, automatically, I would have the above button put it on the hardrive. Then a menu would come up while it's recording to the hardrive, to ask you if you want to record on something else. And if you did, you'd click that option and it would start recording there instead. If you just click OK, if would simply continue recording to hardrive. If the hardrive is already recording somethng, you would have programmed a second default recording destination like ... VCR ... recording would commence there, and then offer other options as before ... while it's recording to VCR.

All this is simple to do ... but ... it would take a gradual replacement of the way things are done now ... confusion. This might take a few years for a standards committee to set the "rules and regs" so that manufacturers could begin adopting that standard. It most certainly will happen. It's just a question of ...

When?

Ebtx Home Page