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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!
Brain/eye bandwidth is now the real problem. Anyone working on that?
If you have banked 1200 hours of TV programming that you still need to watch, you've obviously been slacking off on your TV watching responsibilities. Come on, people, get with the program... you act like all you have to do all day is work or something.
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?
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
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.
Let's see...this device allows you to watch over 1,000 hours of television programming without viewing the commercials? If Dante Alighieri were president of MPAA, the Tivo people would roam a ring of hell inbetween Mohammed Atta and the deMedici family. Valenti, on the other hand, will probably make some comparison to the Boston Strangler instead.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
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
Taco wrote "Gonna need the space since scifi has decided to air 4 episodes of SG1 a day." I thought we were boycotting ScFi until they decided to bring back Farscape ;)
.. 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
Now, if those 4 drives are a raid array, and I can keep my shows through a disk crash, then I'm impressed. Otherwise, nah.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
I'm pretty sure that you didn't spend 500 days outside last year either. . .
All my money went to Nigeria and all I got was this lousy sig. . .
(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.
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.
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.
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.
I think we have 10 comments already on how you don't need this much to keep up with your tv watching. Which is of course true.
But what makes this compelling to me is as a permanent storage medium. You can store entire seasons of many of your favorite shows. Every Seinfeld, Buffy, +20 other shows episode available within a few seconds, in perfect broadcast quality for ever.
I'd pay for that!
Don't think of it like your current Tivo, where you record shows to watch later in the week; instead, think of it as a video archive machine. I was just going through my old video tapes last night, and was amazed by the things I have on tape that I totally forgot about. Imagine that instead of having every episode of the Simpsons on tape somewhere, you have every episode archived and instantly available on your Tivo. And heck, you would probably put all of your home videos on it; now you can re-watch the birth of your son at the push of a button!
Of course, this probably actually requires more space than 1200 hours (you would want redundancy, so RAID eats some of that, and you would want to record in a higher-quality mode, eating even more.) This is ridiculously expensive today, but I bet that in 5 years, the "Tivo video archive" will be common.
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
Copyright Industry Association of America spokestrog Vilary Halenti today lamented "the emergence of a new and more deadly form of IPiracy that will soon raid the and pillage the IP repositories of this great nation. The IPirates have upgraded from their little rubber dinghies they used to IPirate Copyrighted Protected Digital Intelletctual Property and are now getting TiVo-class heavy freighters that they can use to IPirate even more than ever before. We are disappointed that the US hasn't gone after these terrorists with the same vigor that they've gone after the Taliban and Al Qaeda. We can only hope that Rep. Berman's legalized hacking for rich copyright holders bill will set the precedent necessary for giving us the broad powers we need to defeat the IPirates."
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
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
"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.
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.
Here's what I see as the problem with this much storage:
If these issues can be resolved, I bet quite a few geeks would actually get some use out of 1200 hours of programs.
Hmmm... Thats all well and fine... but a bit excessive I'd say. I dont currently own a tivo - many of my friends do - and although I think they are nice, I dont think that I miss all that much not having 1200 hours or any other number, worth of space for recording.
however! please contact me when they have come out with a tivo that has an automated DVD burner in it - where I can schedule a show to be recorded - burned - deleted all while I am out at the beach!
Is the unit also modified with 802.11?