Buried in this story over at PCWorld on all the unexpected gadgets that getting WiFi added to them, like a digital camera from Sanyo and a handheld file server from Sony, is this: a new DVD recorder from Matsushita that records television shows at 1.3 times faster than normal speed. Why? “That’s slow enough to understand what is going on but also cuts the time it takes to watch a TV show by a quarter.” Sounds crazy, but if you’re a busy person, that’ll skim fifteen minutes off an hour-long show.
Here at Gizmodo we’ve got another trick for cramming more TV into less time, though it only works with a TiVo or other digital video recorder: turn on closed-captioning and watch the show on TiVo’s slowest fast-forward setting. The captions will still pop up, so you won’t miss what anyone’s saying, but everything will happen in double-speed, making it perfect for watching three episodes of Blind Date in a half hour. And yes, we know how messed up this is.
