Dan,
You just made me laugh out loud! I'm "only" 64 but I did a totally senior thing yesterday. Now, in order to see the humor in this, take into consideration that we have the top cable package available through our provider, for which I pay in excess of $300 per month. It features OnDemand as well, and over the years we have purchased entire series such as
Big Bang Theory,
Third Rock From the Sun,
New Girl,
Two Broke Girls, etc. These generally sell for about $20 per season each. We do this because in the early Spring and late Summer, we find there is absolutely nothing broadcasting that interests us. Most of these series have been watched in their entirety at least twice. Neither of us are sports fans so we're now in the midst of rather dry spell, programming-wise. We have a Roku streaming device that we received several years ago as a gift but I've never bothered to figure out how it works so it's useless. I commented to Gloria over the weekend as we were watching
Third Rock From the Sun for a third time that I missed having a DVD player. We actually own probably close to hundred DVDs that we've never watched! Some were gifts and some were purchases that we never had the time to watch before we replaced our trust old VCR/DVD combo with a DVR some years ago. She asked, "do they still make them?" and to be honest, I didn't know. A quick online search told me that they do, so I went by Walmart and picked one up Monday morning; nothing fancy, just a basic DVD player which supposedly came with everything needed to hook it up. Our den television is a 65-inch wall mounted set with all wiring run through the wall for a neat installation. It has HDMI ports available on the right side which is good because that's how this DVD player connects. I had a dickens of a time getting that HDMI cable plugged in because it's 12-14 inches from the edge of the set and it's hard to slide your hand in there, position the plug correctly, and push it into place. The cable that came with the DVD player was only four feet long and would not reach the access hole into the wall! As a temporary measure, I decided to place the DVD player on a small table with its black cable exposed. The power cord is only three feet long and could just barely reach the one available receptacle, so I ended up with the player on a small table with the HDMI cable coming from the TV on its left, and the power cord continuing toward the right to the receptacle. It looked terrible, but it worked! We started into a seven-disc set of the lost episodes of
The Carol Burnett Show which we purchased in 2015. It was still in the wrapper! Tuesday I was out playing music so I couldn't turn my attention back to properly installing this thing until last evening. Went back to Walmart, purchased an additional $50 worth of stuff, and dived in. They had HDMI cables in six foot and twelve foot lengths but nothing in between. Deciding to err on the side of caution I went with the twelve-footer which I had to wrap up around the TV mounting bracket to take up slack. Then I couldn't guide it into the access hole in the wall without removing the lock rod from the bracket and pulling the bottom of the television outward, away from the wall. That was fun! Got it in and fished it back out through the egress hole below it and re-secured the television. From there, I threaded the HDMI cable in through the hole in the back of the media cabinet below the television and the power cord out through the same hole to go to the receptacle. I added a six-plug receptacle-mounted surge protector in order to accommodate the power cords for the TV, DVR, and DVD player. Done! Turned it on and it didn't work! Starting at the receptacle, I retraced my steps and found that the HDMI cable connection wasn't properly seated at the television. Oh, if I'd only started my retrace at the other end! lol So... at age 64 I can even be challenged by old technology! That's why the description of your dad's VCR recording skills made me laugh. Have a great day!!!
Dwayne