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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!
What does the MPAA have to say about this?
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
My Tivo has 60some hours of recording time. And it's more than enough. The reality of TV watching is that there is very little worth seeing more than twice. I don't know that I've ever had anything auto-deleted that I wanted to watch, and if I did, I'd blame myself for not getting around to it in the first 30 days. If you're shopping Tivos, upgrade, but don't go nuts, it's just not necessary...
That's 50 days of straight programming. 50 days, 24 hours a day.
It's cool, but come on, it's unnecessary. If you are 1200 hours behind in programming, you are just not going to catch up, period.
I suppose this would be cool though if you had 4 smaller hard drives around that you weren't doing anything with, to increase the capacity more without having to buy another hard drive, or swap out one that you were already using for the Tivo.
Mark
1000+ hours is awesome, but what good is it if you want to record more than one channel at a time?
Are there any tuner hacks to TiVo?
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
.. not that you don't actually need to record and save that much TV/Movies on your Tivo, but rather it can be done and Tivo doesn't seem to be preventing it.
What makes Tivo so popular to "hackers" is that Tivo does not seek legal action on every little hack that is developed. Of course, if one would create a hack that bypasses the subscription process; that's a different story, but they seem to be pretty open to hacks such as these.
Too bad we can't say the same for xBox. I would really love it if I could also use my xBox as a MAME console.
Live web cams
As a side note, you really don't want a 7200 rpm drive in a TiVo. 5400 rpm is preferred, since they generate less heat, and TiVo's can have heat problems as is.
Umm, no. All you've done is reinvent the VCR using VCD instead.
And you'll need one big-ass cabinet to store 1200 disks.
The difference between a TiVo and a PC with a TV tuner card is like the difference between a 1950's B&W console and a home theater.
"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
With only 2-3hrs/week of TV, yeah, you'd be fine.
1200HRs of TV means you are look at the TV too much. Even over a year.
First of all, you're saying it's cheaper, but it's not. You're leaving out the cost of your computer, hard drives, etc. Now add $150 for the special video card. And to top it all off, what you're left with is nowhere near as easy to use or as convenient or as smart or as living-room-appearance-friendly as TiVo.
Although it would be nice to have an easy way to pull and archive video off TiVo, it's not crucial, and if it was, I could use one of the TiVo net hacks to implement it.
"And like that
Not to rain on their parade, I like saving shows as much as the next packgeek and it is nice to just let the TIVO record what it will and then delete what you aren't interested in.
:)
The problem is, when you get up to only 100+ gig of storage space on it, even with the memory modifications, the TIVO takes a while to bring the recording lists up (~1-2 minutes on my full 120 single drive unit). Having all that space isn't really going to do much if it takes 5-10 minutes everytime you want to look through your recording list. On the bright side, the guys at 9th tee know this already so I have high hopes for a solution when the drive expansion unit becomes available
I mean really, there's always someone who says:
Get old (486/Pentium/PII), install capture card, xxx GB disk, xyz software, burner and its "as good as Tivo".
Occasionally you can substitute in "install linux, xwindows, etc" in there someplace.
My TiVO was less than that ($80) from ubid.com
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
1) I have my TiVO record my favorite shows.
2) I dump the saved programs (over Telnet) to my main computer.
3) I de-interlace and convert the MPEG2 stream to a 452x460 (from a 480x480 source, but with the TV noise trimmed off the sides) DiVX or SVCD.
4) I have a perfect copy of the recorded show.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
TiVO Series 2 almost completely gets rid of the problems you're describing, and so does upgrading a Series 1 unit with more RAM (actually desoldering the 32 meg chip and upgrading it to a 64 meg one..)
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
No no, I was laying out what I do to contradict your "no huge tivo" argument :) I just let the TiVO do the hard work (actually capturing the MPEG2 video), and then dump it off to my PC for conversion. I have yet to find a PC-based PVR that works reliably (as ATI cards are filth.).. Maybe I'll give Sigma's PVR card a shot someday though.
I do agree that TiVO should use some sort of network attached storage, or be capable of storing it's data across a network.. but I think the Tivo corporation is a little wary of this, as it might make "pirating" video an easier task.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
Is the unit also modified with 802.11?