For some reason, I don’t even remember why, I was checking out my Dish Network account online. One of the choices is My Pay Per View Certificates. So I clicked it and it said I had certificates for 2 free movies. The certificates were effective back in October, but they expired that day (January 31). Well, I was at work, so I couldn’t watch movies and the odds couldn’t be good for me to get home and be able to find and watch two movies back-to-back that I really wanted to see. But they have a neat feature where you can go online from anywhere and tell your DVR to record things, so I tried that, but the site isn’t compatible with Internet Explorer 7. So once I got home, I went through and found Moneyball, which I had really been wanting to see anyway. Then I had to look for another movie and found Ides of March, where George Clooney is running for president. I guess. But then somewhere in the rules when I was picking the movies it told me that once I started watching the movie I would only have 24 hours to watch it. Well, that gave me some time. I could watch one tonight and one tomorrow night. But, also I could also start watching it any time up until April. Even better. I love having a DVR. And those terms are pretty decent (although the movies were something like $6.99 each which I would never pay).
So I wanted to start watching it a couple of days later and got an error message saying I couldn’t watch it with the digital output device I had connected to my receiver. I have a really old HDTV that doesn’t even have HDMI jacks, so I didn’t think anything was digital, but I figured that rather than deal with it now, I would look that up later.
This weekend I thought that maybe my digital output device was the toslink audio cable. Instead of carrying an electrical signal, the cord is fiber optic and carries light from the satellite to my audio receiver without any loss in quality or interference. So I disconnected it and the movie played no problem. I could play audio through the TV instead of the surround sound system.
Good movie. I’m glad I checked my Dish account. I checked again just now and no new certificates. Don’t know when I’ll get around to Ides of March.