Tech Talk: David Behrens gets to grips with digital TV troubles.

The first thing I noticed was that the clock on my DVD recorder was wrong. It used to set itself automatically from analogue teletext but that signal has gone now. That’s the least of its problems, though, because it’s now about as much use for recording programmes as a colander is for catching rainwater.

It used to use a system called VideoPlus, which involved keying in a six digit number from that day’s paper. It contained all the information it needed to tune to the right channel and start and stop recording at more or less the right time. But VideoPlus is redundant on two fronts: first, it can’t tell one digital channel from another; and second, it’s only to be found on devices with old analogue tuners.

I know from the number of calls to the Yorkshire Post office in the last fortnight that quite a few of you are also in VideoPlus limbo, so here’s how you can (just about) resurrect your old gear. Be warned, though: it involves exactly the sort of Heath Robinson tinkering that VideoPlus was supposed to do away with.

Your VideoPlus recorder’s inbuilt tuner will no longer work, so your first step is to connect it to a digital Freeview receiver. Do this by running a Scart cable from a spare output of the Freeview box to the input on the recorder. Next, tune the recorder into the receiver, usually by selecting AV1 or AV2 as the channel.

You now need to tell the VideoPlus unit to record from the AV channel (and not channels 1, 2, 3 or 4) every time you key in a number. Finally, for each recording you need to set a second timer on the Freeview receiver so that it switches to the right digital channel at the right time.

Got that? Even if you have, there are restrictions – the most obvious being that unless you have two Freeview boxes, you can only record the channel you are watching. This is a tough pill to swallow, since a feature of every video recorder since 1975 was the ability to tape one channel while you were watching another.

The successor to VideoPlus – and a much better solution all round – is Freeview Plus, a combined receiver and recorder that lets you select programmes from an on-screen guide. Lots of models are available from £90 on the high street or £75 online.