Technology

As is often the case with these things - it should be so simple.

I meant to record a programme on Channel 4 a couple of weeks ago, but for various reasons forgot. Never mind, I thought, I can use the 4OD catch up service - the on-demand video streaming service that has now entered the realms of reality and is free.

But, I thought, watching it on the PC screen is a bit rubbish, lets watch it on the proper telly. So I toddled off an purchased a lovely adapter from my local Apple reseller (for my equally lovely MacBook Pro) and set about plugging it all in to the telly to watch in glorious, old-fashioned, CRT-vision. But NO, Windows on my Mac refuses to accept that I have anything plugged in to the DVI port and gets into a bit of a tizz when you ask it to use the external display port. Whereas, OS-X works wonderfully without a whimper, but, of course, Channel 4 OD is not available for the Mac (for reasons which seem steeped in ineptitude and stupidity).
Ah-ha, I thought, time for Parallels, but alas no. Whereas iPlayer works fine under Vista in Parallels, for some reason the 4OD player does not.

So, I'm left at the end of a very frustrating afternoon with little chance of actually making it work. I shall spend some time in the next few days searching the forums and hope that there is some magic cure for this, but I generally feel that the PC (i.e. Windows, and more specifically NVidia) has let me down again. The platform itself and the people who develop for it always make too many assumptions, which is why it end up in things just not working properly. With a bit more care and thought, things like this just wouldn't happen and, other than putting armies of support people out of business, the world would be a much happier and better place.