The tuner in my TV died today, and it was one of the best things to happen all weekend! I discovered that my Sony VCR has what i can only describe as RDS. It displays the current station call letters and program name. I have had the VCR for years and had no idea that it was capable of this. I cant believe that this was possible and my expensive sony TV (another TV) cant do it!

I went back and looked in the owners manual for the VCR, and there is no reference to this capability. The only thing mentioned is that it can pick up a date/time signal off the cable - so no blinking "12:00". In my estimation the RDS feature is way cooler.

Has any one else seen this feature on a TV?

I have a Sony VHS that does the same thing. I have never seen a TV that had this built in. Nor have I ever seen another brand VCR with this capability.

Toshiba and JVC implement it as well. It's not meant to be in the TV tuner, but works in combination with the TV (assuming that the TV supports it). It's marketed here as IntelliView, and I have seen it elsewhere as SmartVu. It's dependent on the station transmitting.

Why is it small pieces of technology can be so cool

My panasonic video did exactly the same tuned itself in and set the clock

I first noticed this on my TV a few years ago (If it's the same thing I think you're talking about). I was surprised that my TV had an INFO button and could display the station name and Program name. I'm pretty sure all this data is sent in the bottom (or top?) few lines of the TV data. Time codes and Text can be sent. Recent VCR's can set their clock via this signal, but in the US, I haven't seen many stations that broadcast time. For the most part, all the PBS stations do, so some VCR's tell you to change the channel to PBS before auto-setting the clock.

My TV and my VCR both support this (i.e. displaying the station name and grabbing the time from one of the stations). The info they use for this (in both cases) is from the VideoText signal which is sent during the vertical page flip. Note that VideoText supports two clocks: One that is displayed in the top right and one that is not displayed. Plus there might be a VPS signal on some stations (I really wished all stations sent those), but the VPS signal has almost nothing to do with real clock time, it only denotes the different programs (if a movie gets sent delayed, the according VPS signal will also be delayed).
Anyway: I noticed (due to a station that doesn't actually conform to the videotext/teletext/toptext standards) that both my VCR and my TV actually grab both the station name and the time from the top line of the text (i.e. clock from upper right corner, station name from upper left. Thank god both of my units allow me to select the station they get the time from.

cu,
sven

I would say 70% of the stations on my cable provider display either station name or program name. Probably 40% do both.

I have since relocated this magical VCR to the living room, just to utilize this feature more often. I am still disapointed that my sony WEGA can not do this, but the sony vcr which cost ~10 times less can.

I belive my new panasonic TV does this, also displaying the current show rating information. I really don't ever use the feature because my tv is not used as a tuner, that's what TiVo is for :)