Speaker by Various Artists

This week I fleetingly suffered some existential angst about being the owner of this Freeview DVR. I mean what’s it all for? Also we don’t have many luxury items in our house and I consider the DVR to be one. In trying to justify it, I have come to the conclusion that is improving our existing electronic-ware. Also instead of encouraging me to watch more TV, it’s actually helping me be more selective in my viewing.

This was a week for getting to watch some of the things I’ve recorded (I keep wanting to type ‘taped’). For example New Artland neo-nana knitting, and The Good Word and its bookish goodness. I want to watch the show about Te Papa on TVNZ 7 but the one time I hunted for it, I couldn’t see it on the EPG. I will try again and also program in Talk Talk and The Gravy. This all means instead of just veging in front of whatever is on, I can watch something more ‘edifying’.

We did have a small glitch with the daylight saving change-over. One nice feature of this unit is that if you leave it on standby, it will still record your programmes. However I found that it will not update itself to daylight savings time in this mode. This meant that last Sunday we got Everybody Loves Raymond recorded rather than the news. As soon as we powered it on, the problem rectified itself though.

I did try out the 3 USB ports (2 hosts and 1 slave) but found no use for them apart from unit software upgrades. It also has a serial port for this purpose, yet the manual states the unit will update itself anyway. It would be very useful to be able to play things via the USB port and also access the Homecast’s HDD this way. We have our system configured just now with a laptop hooked up to the TV, which you can do some of these things through (its currently our DVD player as well). But if we took that away and reconnected our old DVD recorder (it’s an either/or situation) the USB functionality would be great. Actually this brings me to another point. It would be good if there were some inputs on the DVR, as running the VCR and/or DVD through it would be handy. I am guessing this is only an issue because the rest of our gear is older. I just think it would be more flexible with this functionality.

I am still a bit anxious about the DVR and its greatness, but hey who wants to miss Jacquelyn Greenbank’s knitted deer?

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Well four weeks or so with our Freeview recorder and I really love it. I have managed to watch all sorts of programs when I get a minute, rather than having to be ‘on the spot’. I can’t rave enough about the recording features and just Freeview itself. I thought for my final post I’d talk about the key things I like about the DVR and Freeview and also a few of the quirky, annoying things

Even with a crappy old CRT TV, the Freeview DVR has been awesome splendid. Our VHF reception issues were instantly solved, and the extra channels are really good.

I am very taken with the Freeveiw channels TVNZ6 and especially TVNZ7 which has things I really love watching. New Artland is a highlight and no more watching it on the ‘net and sucking up broadband for me. TV3+1 seemed pointless for a start but I have used it if I’ve missed something or forgotten to record it.

I possibly don’t use the EPG as much as I could. The best feature is the series record though. This has meant that for the last month I have hardly missed an episode of anything I actually like to watch. It’s almost like programming your own TV channel (which sounds like an ad for some other product but its true!).

Odd, quirky things have been the remote suddenly ceasing to work – with either a complete power down of the DVR required or just a flick into standby and back to fix it. Also sometimes the series record just stops doing its thing. The remote – even with extender in place seems fickle. My main bug bear is the advert skip functionality. I simply can’t work it accurately either on skip or using fast forward and end up getting very annoyed going backwards and forwards. Mind you that could be because our screen is quite small and hard to read just how far/fast you are skipping. I guess advertisers will be happy though. Also, I would have liked to be able to interact with the unit via the serial or USB ports. Maybe a future software update will allow this?

Over all I am very happy with this unit. Although we are not the heaviest TV viewers, the DVR has simplified our pick and choose approach. I sort of wonder how it would all work if you had Sky as well but it’s not an issue for us. The DVR certainly gets thumbs up in our household.

Pauline Dawson: Homecast HT9200DTR

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Added:

Joanna McLeod, Zinwell ZMT-640PVR

If I was a cleverer person, I would have installed my freeview decoder in my bedroom. After all, there are aerial cables in here. But instead I put it in the lounge for everyone to enjoy - which means that when I'm hiding out in my room I don't get to enjoy it myself. Stupid me. So the shows that I want to watch are piling up on the hard drive while I cuddle my laptop instead, getting spoilers for Shortland Street on Twitter when everyone was all "OMG SHANTI NO!". 

It's handy then that when you watch a show it changes colour on the playlist so you know you've already seen it. I am also enjoying that if you stop a programme halfway through, it will start playing again from where you stopped when you come back to it. The problem though is there's not really very many shows worth watching on these days. The Battlestar episodes are piling up waiting for an afternoon when I have a full attention span, I'm still enjoying The Riches, but apart from that, it's really just Shortland Street, The Daily Show and the news headlines that I'm interested in. Oh, and Top Chef and ANTM. But the networks are taking far too long to bring on the good shows, so I'm getting my Community, Glee, Parks & Recreation and Dollhouse fixes elsewhere. It would be awesome if I was able to plug a portable hardrive into the Freeview box to view them, but I don't think I can. I'm not sure why it has a USB port then. I have yet to discover a use for it. Perhaps I will next week. But now I must go remember to hit the EPG button and make sure I get Season Two of the Jacquie Brown Show recorded, because she is brilliant and I want to have her awkward babies.

Bad taste is easy for me. I come from a city that's famous for its carnival season. Once a year, all of Cologne stops working, dons their most imaginative costumes, and misbehaves for an entire week. I once dressed as Monica Lewinsky in a black suit, with decorative yoghurt stains down my front. My then-boyfriend partnered me as Bill Clinton -- complete with a Frankfurter hanging from his fly. Needless to say, our shared sense of questionable humour quickly led to marriage.

I struggle with some New Zealand costume parties, though. One that we were asked to attend shortly after moving to Christchurch, and as the only Germans on that night, had a WWII theme. How anyone could see the funny side of genocide, killings, torture, suffering and destruction escaped us. What should we go as -- bomb raid victims, maybe? Fold my yoga-exercised leg into a stump? Or even better, scribble a fake concentration camp tattoo on my forearm and put on striped pyjamas? Hilarious.

There is nothing to celebrate or spoof from our point of view, and that is not -- as one sympathetic Anglo-Saxon friend assumed -- because we "lost the war".

If you have a grown up in Germany, then the Third Reich is not about winning or losing. It's not about military accomplishments, Hogan's Heroes or Dam Busters. It's about human tragedy and atrocities of the worst possible kind. It's shameful, and it's painful, and it's impossible to grasp in its monstrosity. Your grandparents were either victims, perpetrators or witnesses. Your parents -- some not even born at the time -- were affected by it as the surviving or post-war generation. They were in denial or became overtly political.

Some turned into left-wing radicals, some worked for reconciliation in Israeli Kibbutzim. The guilt and the awareness is always there, even three generations later. This is why most young Germans today would rather poke out their eyeballs than proclaim themselves "proud to be German". We don't like uniforms, clapping in unison or singing our national anthem. We were raised with national shame, not national pride. Anything that reeks of being "typically German" makes us cringe and hide in our über-cool dens of urbanism, angsty art and intellectualism. That's why you'll seldom find any self-respecting German at the Munich Oktoberfest (which is for tourists). There is so much widely accepted self-hatred between the Alps and the Baltic Sea that Sigmund Freud would have a field-day with us.

To throw a party themed around the darkest period in German history is as fitting as having a 'Stolen Generation' ball in Darwin ("Bring your black and your white mum"), or a 'Killing Fields' piss-up with a Pol Pot look-alike contest at the Cambodian cultural centre.

In my home country, only a right-wing white supremacist would ever don Nazi outfits of any sort. Fun or no fun, he would be arrested. Displaying (or spraying) a swastika is not only highly offensive, but a criminal act. When the long-running Broadway musical The Producers was put on stage in Berlin this year, for the first time ever the symbols on the red and black flags had to be pretzels instead of the infamous four-armed cross. Complicated, if all you know about 'the Krauts' comes from Commando books, The Sun or Fawlty Towers.

Only in the last couple of years have the descendants of the 'Reich' allowed themselves reluctantly to make fun of Hitler and the evil that he represents. And no, that is not because of their renowned absence of humour (or because they don't shave their legs, wear socks with sandals, lie nude on the beach and shout "Jawohl, Herr Kommandant" all the time). The first German comedy about 'Mein Führer' only came out in 2007 (and under that title), created by a Swiss-born Jewish film-maker. He had lifted the taboo -- but only just. Others are about to follow. It's a brave and difficult undertaking, but a necessary one if done in the right spirit. It helps to keep the memory alive, instead of it merely becoming an over-repeated history lesson with a chest-beating moral.

The students who attended the Oktoberfest party at Lincoln University a week ago don't quite fall into that same category of comedy. Well, they tried to push boundaries: there was a lot of creativity on display. Spray-painted Stars of David, rattling chains, two-finger moustaches, whips and guns -- you name it. According to one party-goer, the crowd got so carried away that they ripped a basin off the wall. Hey, there were no proper bathrooms in Auschwitz either, so I guess that was an attempt to be historically correct. Don't blame the kids for having fun.

The Nazi costume parade at Lincoln didn't just offend me because of its belittlement of crime and suffering. In the six years that I've lived in New Zealand, I have adjusted to the fact that -- with the distance between here and Europe -- Adolf Hitler is (to many) no more than a cartoon character like Batman or Shrek. What shocked me and hurt my national feelings (or the miniscule remainder of those feelings) was that if you invite a group of young adults who have qualified for tertiary education to a party "dressed as Germans", then about half of them will turn up as Nazis. Call me sensitive, but even Dirndl and Lederhosen would have too much for me to stomach. I feel for the large number of German students who attend Lincoln University. Talk about culture shock (and I don't mean the gumboots outside the library).

Anyone who is in two minds about what to mock and what not should listen to the brilliant history-buff, Dan Carlin. His answer is simple: as long as there are still people alive who bear the number on their arm -- it's not a joke. That tattoo is real.

Anke Richter is a foreign correspondent for the German media. She has written two books and is currently working on her third, a satirical novel about the perception and stereotypes of Germans in New Zealand.

So far the single best thing I've found about my freeview decoder? Burglars don't recognise its value so they leave it behind when they cart off my other geek necessities (goodbye laptop, eeePC, ipod, camera, flatmate's playstation...). Needless to say now that I no longer have a hard drive bulging with totally legitimate television downloads, I will be relying much more on the shiny Zinwell ZMT-640PVR.

I have discovered that occasionally when the news tapes, it shows up as TV3 Plus 1 in the playlist, but I'm unsure if that's maybe something my flatmates have done. Likewise, occasionally programmes that I expect to have taped aren't there. I am blaming my flatmates and thinking that this may be the week to figure out password protection. The idea of having a whole channel dedicated to carrying TV3 shows just a couple of hours after they've already run is pretty clever though. I occasionally refer to myself as being on Perth time due to my sleeping habits, and it is nice that Freeview is catering to someone on Sydney time.

Comments on PA system about my last Freeview diary went over my head very very quickly, with extensive talk of HDMI encoding and all kinds of hacks and talks of different coloured cables. I want to stress that the Zinwell is redonkulously easy to use, and you don't have to be able to follow any of the things that the resident PA technocrats were going on about. Four coloured buttons, the info key and the electronic programme guide will keep you satisfied. The one thing that I really must remember to do is start recording Shortland Street from the beginnning which screens at 8pm weeknights on TVNZ6. Marge is still manning the reception desk! Gina is pushing her trolley! Steve Mills is still alive (um, spoiler alert...). And I hear that some guys called Russell and Damian also have shows on the extra channels. I really should check those out pretty soon...

Joanna McLeod, Zinwell ZMT-640PVR

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Well the excitement of having a new gadget has died down a bit and now we are learning to live the DVR.

For me the single button recording from the EPG is simply the best feature. Of course I have been recording madly and not having the time to watch very much. For example I hardly ever get to watch the news because of children’s activities around that time, so I have it on automatic record every night. I am sad to report I have only sat down later and watched the recorded news once. For this reason I have found a really helpful feature when viewing recorded programs. If you have to exit that recording for whatever reason, when you go back to it, resumes playing in the same spot.

A feature mentioned from one of the commentors after our posts last week made me have a look to see if I can find functionality only to keep the last x number of recorded episodes in a series. Say keep 3 nights of the news before deleting them. It doesn’t look like this model does that though. I am not sure how long it will take to run out of memory on the hard drive (this demo model has 320GB although is meant to have 500GB) but I am being conscientious about deleting unwanted stuff right now. Still we’ve managed to use 100GB already.

We did run into a little issue with the dual recording on Wednesday night. I had set up recording for TV3 and Prime and then tried to watch a third channel. The Freeview website notes that for this model “some channel combinations may not be available” but I wasn’t expecting TV1 and TV2 to be missing. I ended up watching TV7 and “The Backbencher”. Not being a very political animal that didn’t last very long, but quite funny when switching to parliament TV in the middle and seeing the chamber almost empty (but then realising it was delayed coverage).

The improvement to reception and picture quality is so much that for now we are sticking with our old 21’’ CRT TV for now. Freeview has added a lot of value to it and I don’t have to worry about the kids accidentally wrecking a flash new flat screen. I am a curious to see what I can do with the USB ports on the DVR too, but that’s on the agenda for the weekend. So far it doesn’t look like you can hook up the computer to it though.

Pauline Dawson: Homecast HT9200DTR

Over the next four weeks, three Public Address readers will be lounge-testing three different Freeview digital video recorders. How easy are these new boxes to set up and use? What features are there? What's on Freeview anyway? And how is life with a DVR?

First impressions from Joanna McLeod (Wellington) and Pauline Dawson (Dunedin) are below. The third Freeviewer, Aucklander Mark Dansey, will be along shortly after his box is delivered this week.

But onwards …

Joanna McLeod (Zinwell ZMT-640PVR)

I like watching television. Well, I like a lot of shows on TV. I don't like having to watch things at a particular time. Like, networks, you are not the boss of me! Plus, I am very popular and cool and I go out a lot. For a couple of years I've had a dvr, which I thought would be great but is actually pretty dreadful. The remote control died on me, it requires constant rebooting and it forces you to watch the channel you're recording. Oh how I hate it. I learnt how to programme it, but I've never mastered the art of getting my flatmates to stop quitting the programmes that I wanted it to record.

Naturally then, the first thing I looked for when I ripped open the courier package from Freeview was whether or not my new Zinwell had two tuners in it. It did! Hurrah! There were a lot of pretty coloured cords in the freeview box, and I was initially a bit freaked out before I realised that oh yes, they're for people with fancy TVs, not old CRTs. All I needed was the simple red, white and yellow ones. The only mildly tricky bit was the crossover cable out from one tuner into another, which made me worry about Ghostbusters crossing their streams. I plugged in the aerial cable, and wonder of wonders, it said it was scanning and installing the channels itself. I didn't even need to put the time in!

Once it was set up, a quick flick through the instructions had me hitting the EPG button for the electronic programme guide, and from there it was a matter of using coloured buttons to navigate through the next eight days. When I went to record a show, it asked me if I wanted to record the whole season. None of this scrambling to type in times and numbers and days of the old system, and being distraught by overlapping times. Within five minutes, I'd programmed it to record all the shows I want to watch.

Which, if you're interested in knowing just how much television I really do watch, here's the list:

Shortland Street, 3 News (but oh how angry it makes me!), The Office, The Simpsons, Home & Away (for my flatmate, honest), America's Next Top Model, Harper's Island (I think this is actually going to suck, based on one episode, but Jeffery Bell was involved in Angel, so I'm willing to give it a go), The Riches, Battlestar Galactica (I'm new to this. Spoil it and I'll cut you), The Daily Show, Grand Designs (the perfect hangover show).

Watch this space…

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Pauline Dawson: Homecast HT9200DTR

There was quite a lot of excitement in our house this week with the arrival of our Freeview DVR.

Although many years ago I actually had a trade cert in radio engineering, I have let my techy skills lapse. These days I leave the setting up of such things to the man of the house, but I decided to give this ago – for review purposes. I have to say I’ve never set anything up so easily straight out of the box. I give bonus points for coming with all necessary cables (even an HDMI one!) – something I was concerned about as it would have been a bit of a drive to the city if I needed to buy some. Setting up channels was a breeze and incredibly quick. And presto we suddenly had awesome television reception on all our existing available channels plus much more. We had been struggling with awful VHF reception, which made TV1 unwatchable. Problem now solved (although I can’t recall what I used to watch on TV1)

One thing I did have to compromise over was combining this new technology with our existing audio/visual stuff. Our TV is getting on to 15 years old with limited inputs. We have a VHS because we seem to have inordinate amount of kids Disney films on video, a DVD player and also we like to play things from the laptop through the television from time to time. With some jigging around it all fits together, but my partner is now itching for a new HD TV to make full use of the Freeview HD features. (Hey if anyone wants me to review an LCD set….). I did wonder if it would be really useful to have a DVD player/burner as part of the DVR unit – maybe that is a future option?

Again I have to emphasise how easy this thing is to use. I have only had the briefest skim through the manual but the on screen menus are so easy to follow. I set the unit up on a Tuesday and immediately was doing one touch series recording for Outrageous Fortune through the Electronic Programme Guide (EPG). I have now set up the news and various other programs that I often forget about because I am busy with the kids’ bedtimes etc. The twin tuner also let me record two programmes while watching a third on Wednesday night. So far, the only thing I am having difficulty with is the time slip functionality. Maybe I am doing something wrong but it resets when you change channel. Also only being able to put it on fast forward or jumping in 5 second units is a pain. However I’ve just this minute found out how to tweak it.

Apart from the unit itself, it’s great to have Freeview. Kidzone has been a godsend this week when I’ve had children home sick. I’m looking for to exploring some more.

Dear Person Interested in New Zealand film: I think this a fair and true statement to make: "Local films are made with lots of love and passion."

A great romance is someone falling in love with a story and wanting to create it for others to embrace. Bitten by this love bug, local casts and crews work in harmony on something they all want to love. The fairytale ending is seeing the story unfold on a big silver screen.

But like all great love affairs it usually ends in ... tragedy.

The film misses out on a festival premiere, snags no distribution and sits on a shelf or at the most, dribbles out a few DVD copies down the line. 
This doesn't just happen to self-funded films. It can happen with NZ Film Commission-funded films. And everyone talks about changing models of distribution and how the playing field has changed.


"Forget cinemas!" they shout, "Your market is downloads."

Well, I might be a naive bigscreen purist, but to me there is something inherently powerful about seeing films on a large screen and not a 17" monitor. Films shown in a collective environment have the ability to create a frisson that no downloaded film can equal. If we get to the mindset about doing away with any theatrical plan for smaller local films, you may as well kill the NZFC and put the monies into NZ On Air.

With the findings from the Ministerial review of the NZFC yet to come, it'll be interesting to see how much thought (and money) will be devoted to the idea of infrastructure to support the release of local product.

Films that don't have major distributors behind them or enthusiastic exhibitor support usually end up going direct to video after a possible festival premiere. Sometimes a self-distributed release will score a few days here and there at their local supportive arthouse but virtually never at a 'plex.

France, Spain and Germany have thriving film scenes and that's mainly down to two reasons. Quotas and language barriers.

If we all spoke Te Reo the local film industry would actually be better off for it. As an English-speaking small country we will always be competing with bigger-budgeted, marketed product. We can never evolve without some sort of subsidy or distribution structure in place.

IDEA #1

Should the Government allocate some monies to subsidise one 100% devoted New Zealand content digital screen in plexes/arthouses in each major city in the country -- thereby guaranteeing that NZ digital films will always have screen space available?

In a commercial environment it's practically impossible for small films to get in front of young audiences as they don't have the marketing clout of studio product or the leverage associated with having a pipeline of upcoming product.

At present a few small indie operators support local digital product by offering limited screen space out of some sense of patriotic duty. I was an arthouse cinema manager when things were tough, I know how they think, and more importantly how they feel. They usually offer space because of the following :


(1) They like the filmmakers gumption and have a sense of patriotic pride

(2) They have some dead space coming up

(3) And, rarest of all - they genuinely believe in the commercial potential of the film.




How to kick apathy in the arse? Lets look at a rather successful model in another medium that has cross over similarities …

IDEA #2

New Zealand music managed to get a quota initiated on local radio and the quota appears to have been eclipsed (even by those who tried to fight it) by the support and growth of the local scene. So ...

Why is there no NEW ZEALAND FILM MONTH?

New Zealand Music Month is something that has been nurtured and supported and has paid off in many ways.

Could we transplant some of the concept to New Zealand film, where there's a focus on local content with 'plexes offering screen space to whole new audiences for a limited time? There could be a concentrated effort from all involved to celebrate local features and shorts and get these smaller films onto screens that are usually completely out of their reach. There would be direct and focused energy to celebrating New Zealand films of all shapes and colours. 


At present there is so much time and energy devoted to making these films by hard working (often with no pay) cast and crews but very little has been thought about the end game for all these films. The end game also means trying to get money back to these people for all their hard work.


This has to change. The old thinking was "why throw good money after bad?". This was told to me by the departed CEO of the New Zealand Film Commission. Why bother releasing and spending money on a film if people don't want it?

It's a good question (except if its a film you funded) but it overlooks the obvious. Who says it's not good? Exhibitors who want the next Dark Knight? Or the NZFC, which originally turned down the local blockbuster Second Hand Wedding?


Nobody knows anything

What we do know is that NZ audiences do like seeing their stories on the big and small screens. We've had enough successes to know this. Breakouts and surprises can happen all the time but without committed space and support, we'll never know the true potential of any film unless we support it to the full extent.


We can't ask exhibitors to just hand over designated screens on a yearly basis without some sort of financial reimbursement -- that screen makes them a lot of money.

But maybe we could ask for one digital screen to be available for one month a year where we have a celebration of all NZ film. We could make quite a party of it.

I know I'd buy a ticket.

Would you?


Ant Timpson: A dude who likes film

PS: Matt Horrocks at The Reservoir has been making some notes on the NZ film scene. Well worth checking out