Necessity is the mother of invention. I've just cancelled my Sky TV contract and as a result I've got a load of recordings on my STB that will become inaccessible in four weeks. While 95% of them are inconsequential, there's 5% that I want to keep for one reason or another. In the olden days, this would be simple - set your VCR to record for a length of time and use the STB's playout feature to play the given recordings out, then go to bed. Things have become progressively trickier over time though, as analogue signals gave way to digital and the 576i achievable on a DVD recorder ten years ago (when Macrovision didn't nobble it - the last stage remained analogue) is a poor substitute for the 1080i that comes out of the STB.

So, how am I going to work with this? By hacking things I had to hand!