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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!
Quick question, I don't own a Tivo or HDTV but if you were to record an HDTV broadcast would it not require more HD space? Would this not better quality be a better use than more recording time?
From one of the linked pages:
I know from my own Tivo that heat is definately a problem in these things with only two drives.
What might fit the ticket a little better would be a firewire (or serial ATA ?) interface and external drives in a separate case, with separate power supply. Unfortunately, I calculate USB to be a bit too slow for simultaneous record/playback at high quality.
Or, even better, how about SCSI with external drives? Well, maybe it's not better, given the price differential on SCSI drives. Hmmm.
Haven't we all been waiting for a way to archive all our movies the way we've archived our music? Just because TiVo records 1200 hours worth of programming doesn't mean you have to watch it all!
Mine has 120 hours of capacity and I've always got some Hitchcock and Woody Allen movies along with the regulary Buffy, Simpsons and West Wing stuff.
More capacity means I can keep stuff on the TiVo much longer and still use it like muggle TiVo owners do.
And no, you CAN NOT make a PC do this with ANY capture card. TiVo's software rocks. It's like Mac OS X vs. DOS. It's got Coax, RCA and S-Video inputs. It's got Coax, RCA and S-Video outputs. It's virtually silent. On-screen programming guide. Two-button recording. Wish lists. And a whole bunch of other stuff you just can't appreciate until you have one.
"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
Well, they don't sue you but they are taking steps to stop you. As far as I know, since this hack requires a new kernel it will not work on the new series 2 TiVos (ie the only ones you can buy new now) since they have "PROM lockdown" code preventing any changes from being made to the system; similarly you can't run TiVoWeb on the Series 2 either. It's possible that someone will break this in the future (it's been done for the DirecTiVos) but I wouldn't overstate the case about TiVo being "hacker friendly."