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Tivo Quadcard Promises Thousand-Hour PVR
edrock200 writes "The folks over at 9thtee are developing a quad card for Tivo series 1 and Tivo/DirecTV combo units...it will allow you to
add 4 hard drives to your Tivo and also break the 133gb limit for each drive....this will effectively give you a 1200-hour unit with 4 320GB drives. Theres also a fairly detailed thread of the development process over at the AVS forums." Gonna need the space since scifi has decided to air 4 episodes of SG1 a day!
The slashdot article mentioning Maxtor's upcoming 320 GB drive can be found here.
Unfortunately, the drive will be a 5400 rpm drive when it comes out some time around the end of this year. However, the article also mentions a 250 GB model that will run at 7200 rpm.
Maybe? Unfortunately I'm not sure how the Tivo writes the video data to an HD, but I do know how other systems do it, and if you're talking about a difference in SD (standard digital) and HD (assuming 1080i resolution), then you'll need twice as much space to playback the video in realtime. Unless of course the Tivo compresses the video the same way anyway regardless of resolution.
Whatever man, I spelled it write!
The DIRECTV with TiVo combo units have 2 tuners.
Record 2 shows while watching something else you already recorded. Life is good.
My Tivo has 60some hours of recording time. And it's more than enough.
First of all, 1200 hrs = about 700 hrs of high quality (your 60hr tivo has closer to 35hrs of high quality record time).
Secondly, 1200 hours of tivo action would give you greater flexability with how you use your tivo. You wouldn't need to delete good shows just because you had already seen them. You could keep a collection of HBO movies instead of buying the DVDs. The entire season of Sopranos, whatever. Tivo is smart, if you already have a show, it won't re-record it (assuming the guide has the epiosde information).
Tivo doesn't have a way of cropping a video such that only a desired scene is kept (one of my suggestions for upgrade), so you need to, for example, save the whole Conan just for the 10 second bit on The guy who's protected from three inch bees. I love that bit, but my 30 hr can't afford an hour for every scene I want to keep around to show my friends when they visit, neither could my 60, or even 120 if I had them. I'd still have the world cup on my tivo if I could, if just to illustrate what I was talking about to my friends when I complain about Kahn crushing my country =(.
With 1200 hrs, maybe tivo will release some software that allows us to put some of our programs into archives, or have some kind of sorting tools. All they have now is a filter for the now-showing guide.
"Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil." -Philips
(A) TiVo has commercial-skip, but it's disabled by default. It's not really a hack since it's built-in. You hit Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select on your remote, and one of the buttons is transformed into 30-second skip. Works wonderfully.
(B) You can fit an ethernet card in TiVo. With software version 3 and a Series 2 TiVo it's not even a hack - builtin USB port and builtin ethernet support means you can plug a USB Ethernet adapter into your TiVo.
Either way, TiVo has a lot more, uh, aftermarket products available. You _can_ do the whole adding-harddrives thing to ReplayTV too, but it's a lot more accessible with TiVo.
Also, you've got the TiVo+DirecTV combination, which is what put it over the top for me. Capture the MPEG stream rather than recompress, and dual tuners.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
Tivo's only do standard resolution television. Therefore, you would need a HDTV box that has a s-video out to record, and it would be recorded at standard tivo resolution (480x480) on a stand-alone (non direcTV) Tivo.
Dish network is working on an HDTV PVR, the 921, and Sony is rumored to be working on an HDTV unit as well, but no word whether tivo technology will be used on that.
You should check out this forum For the latest on tivo technology. A few tivo employees are active contributers-- and the news always hits this place first.
The main reason that most people hack the original Tivos is to get more HD space so they can record more shows. The problem with this is that when you update the "Season Pass" (the list of shows to record), it gets slower as the list gets longer. A lot slower. Modifying a Seasons Pass with > 20 programs can take minutes. A friend of mine has to wait for 10 minutes every time he updates the list. A 1000GB Tivo would be completely unusable.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Check out 9th Tee's web site. It's all there. You have to get a bash prompt, upload specific drivers and utilities, and then you're set. Only thing is that (as far as I know) you have to run it with the case open. The RF shielding won't allow the 802.11b out.
They also have a wired adapter that is a much better deal. You do have to drill a hole for the cable to go inside, but you get wire speed then.
"The folks over at 9thtee are developing..."
NOT!
The QuadCard, like the AirNet and TurboNet adapters also sold through 9thTee, were developed by a TiVo user named Nick Kelsey (known as "jafa" on the TiVo Community Forum.) 9thTee is the distributor - though I don't want to take anything away from them, they have been remarkably supportive of the TiVo community and they deserve kudos for taking the financial risks of selling these add-ons.
It is truly amazing what Nick has been able to do with his electronics expertise.
This is cute and all, but imo, it'll end up doing the same thing that the 2x120gb upgrades do to the TiVo: Just show how miserable the TiVo is at dealing with a big number of programs.
It does work, but the results aren't something I'd like to deal with. One big list (at least you can change the sort order with the latest version of the software). No folders, no searching. Oh, and from what I hear, it can really slow down the TiVo. My un-hacked TiVo takes minutes to exit the season pass manager, and often stumbles for a few seconds pulling up the now playing list. I'd hate to think how long I'm staring at the "Please Wait" display if I had one of these uber-upgrades. Heck, it's bad enough on my unit: Which of the four South Parks is the one I haven't watched yet, and which three are the ones I'm saving for my SO to watch? No way to know from the list, and since it's a show on Comedy Central, there's no way to know without going into the program itself because guide data is sketchy.
Until TiVo really speeds up there system (assuming they can, there's not a lot of horsepower in your average TiVo box), and adds some more advanced options to organize and maintain shows, I think I'll just stick with my ~35 hours. 100+ hours is a nice idea, but IMO, TiVo just doesn't scale that well yet.
-- It is too late for the pebbles to vote, the avalanche has already started.
Well, first, the TiVO hack to enable the skip is not quite the same as the comercial skip on the ReplayTVs. The ReplayTVs automatically detecte the commercial and skip over it. It works about 80-90% of the time for me. The Tivo Hack gives the same abilities as the ReplayTV 2000/3000 (and 4000) to jump quickly 30 seoncds ahead (which is still great).
But, the ReplayTV 4000/4500 series have a ethernet plug AND have DVArchive that allows you to turn a PC into a virtual ReplayTV - downloading and storaing shows and serving them back up to your replay TV. You can keep adding disks and space and never violate the warranty. It even has an automated scheduler so it can sweep good stuff off your ReplayTV while you are away (keeping things from rolling over and losing good shows from lack of space).
Slow-0(zero)-Record-Thumbs Up
This will give you an option on your now playing list for sorting by date, show and expiration date.
I'm not sure if you to have the backdoor mode enabled for it. More details are at: Tivonews backdoors