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Rabid TiVo Fanaticism
surfacearea writes "The New York Times [free reg] is running an article that, without sounding like over-the-top blatant product placement discusses the reasons why TiVo owners are at times frighteningly fanatical. Personally, I won't bother to find out first hand until they slap a recordable DVD drive in there."
Alright, that didn't work, do the Google Affiliate I guess.
There, this one works.
Sorry about that, but still, it's not too hard. There should be no more straight links that require registering in the main story, just get the Google affiliate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/fashion/20TIVO.h tml?ex=1051416000&en=a77422bb2a91649e&ei=5062&part ner=GOOGLE
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
1) Be able to watch one program and record another. With the gol darn digital cable, I can't do that any more. My VCR was cable ready for regular cable, why can't I get a PVR that's digital cable ready? As it is, I can get around this for cannels in the regular cable line up by bypassing the digital cable box, but since my cable provider puts all premium channels on digital, I can't tape a movie and watch Junkyard Wars at the same time. It also makes the timer feature on the vcr practically worthless.
I love the hypocrisy of our local cable company; they have anti-satellite dish commercials that point out that you can't tape one show and watch another without a separate descrambler. No different than digital cable.
2) Like the poster said, it needs a dvd recordable. I'll still buy the dvd collections, but sometimes I want to take a show on the road or loan it to a friend. I can do that just fine with my vcr.
3) HDTV ready. Just to be future safe.
You give me those things and then we'll talk price.
Pop in a 10-hour tape, and tell it to play all those Farscape episodes while you're at work, and you can free up the space on your disk while keeping the program content manageable. It'd be nice to have it record stuff at 8x speeds onto a DVD burner instead of 1x, but remember, this is mostly the TV you haven't watched yet, or the episodes you've seen already plus the one from the last week or two. And if the software's at all bright enough, if you do want to watch the tape later, you should be able to spool it back into the TiVo for random-access play rather than just using your VCR's fast-forward and reverse and such.
(I don't own TiVo myself; we kept dithering about whether we'd rather improve our TV watching experience or stick the TV in the garage so we don't watch it at all, and buying a TiVo would have committed us to one of those strategies :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You need to hit tivocommunity.com immediately for help.
I had a sucky sig.
ya....grab a fresh drive, snag the MFS tools and get someone to point you to an image for your Tivo, and you'll be back in business in 30 mins after the image download is done.
Yyou can insert a NIC card into the TiVo and extract the video streams, convert and burn on the PC. That way you only need one DVD recorder drive.
Is this what you meant?
Jeff
OK. Try here. 100 pack of Lead Datas for $79.00
Combine a 120GB HD and a DVD recorder capable of recording DVD-RAM and DVD-R and you have all you'll ever need. There are tons of models that combine DVD and HDD here in japan.
What am I missing here?
:)
1. With DirecTiVo, you can watch one live show while recording another one. (Okay, you can do that with a VCR) With any unit (even one-tuner standalone ones), you can watch a prerecorded show while recording another one off air. You most definitely cannot do that with a VCR. I often watch a prerecorded show if I come home in the middle of a show I'm recording and I'm not in the mood to watch it at that time.
2. There are no VCRs that can store 100's of hours of programs. I'm away from home all week and have tons of shows that I like to have ready for instant playback when I get home.
3. If you come home in the middle of a recording and you want to see the show, you can start playing the show from the beginning even while the TiVo is still recording the remainder. And you get to fast forward thru the commercials to boot!
4. If you pause live tv to take a call or a shower, you get to FF thru the commercials when you return and "catch up" to live tv. Works great during auto racing and hockey games when you want to FF through slow periods. Same if you rewind and replay exciting action -- all that time is spent building up record-ahead time. Rewind and replay enough times and you will be able to FF through the commercials when you're ready to move on.
5. TiVo also displays descriptions of tv shows while you're channel surfing.
6. Since the video is not accelerated to the television, even during fast forward, the TiVo actually plays closed captions in fast forward!
7. Forget about all the networkable features such as digital extraction of content recorded at DVD quality suitable for burning to recordable media.
8. Um, profit?
Intelligent Life on Earth
I had my TiVo modded to add 2 120 gig HDs [can't go bigger because of a BIOS deal...] and have over 300 hours of viewing goodness. That's over 10 DAYS of programming. That's a lot of SpongeBob. If I wanted, there is an Ethernet add-in that ostensibly allows the"daily call" [for programming info] to be made over your broadband connection. It also allows you to telnet to the TiVo and take programs off the unit to your computer HD for transfer to CD or DVD. Pretty much they are MPEG files with additional info for the TiVo OS. Try Ninthtee for info.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
Actually, TiVo already does that -- we use that feature quite often. Just set the "Keep Until" date to the "Keep Until I Delete" option (green-dot mode). That will make it record the shows, and since it won't erase them until you do it manually, it will stop recording any newer ones; it won't overwrite them. Works like a charm!
--Tom
For TV? A VCD or maybe SVCD recorder maybe.
"If only ReplayTV didn't pretty much just go down the crapper... "
It hasn't gone down the crapper, yet at least. It's still working just fine and I'm still being billed. I also got a notification that service isn't going to be interrupted.
However, I agree, these are scary times for us Replay Subscribers.
"Derp de derp."
Then hit the button to the lower right of your pause key.
"Population 1,656"
Tivo's suggestions are crap. Truly crap.
Shrug. My suggestions are pretty good, on both TiVo's. In fact, we regularly watch stuff from the Suggestions. The key is to not go overboard with thumbs up and down -- if you like a show, give it one or maybe two thumbs up. If you don't like a show give it a single thumbs down. Three thumbs up or down is severe overkill and will certainly screw the Suggestion engine in a nasty way.
This should be improved, and they should really bring back TeachTiVo (which was a backdoor into editing the Suggestion engine - it let you see exactly what the TiVo thought you liked and disliked and allowed you to modify the values). Realize that when you give a thumbs up/down to a show (particularly multiple thumbs) you're not just giving it to that show -- you're also giving it to the genres, the actors, the directors, etc.
ts also is in desperate need of a smarter season pass
That's not a TiVo issue, it's a Comedy Central one. Bitch at them for not giving Tribune Media jack shit for info on their shows -- they don't even give the most rudimentry episode information. Without this there's no way for TiVo to know if it's a rerun or not.
There's a workaround, if you watch it every day though - you can simple change Keep At Most to 1. It'll record every one of them, but only keep one. Obviously no good if you miss a day.
They need to optimise the code or do something to avoid the long 20 seconds of lag I get pretty often
I suspect you have a Series 1. It's running on a 30 MHz CPU. It's doing far more than was ever anticipated for it. It's slow. That's life.
Lastly, it needs some kind of user level password protection.
I do believe that rating based content protection is available. Look under Settings.