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HDTV TiVo Now Shipping
davco9200 writes "After over a year of waiting, the HDTV TiVo from Hughes (HR10-2350) is finally shipping. People have been receiving their first unit and you can read their first impressions. Suffice to say: they love it."
it is your damn laws. tell your government to get rid of the regulations that keep TIVO out.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Ok, there are PC-based units, but will you find one with two DirecTV tuners and two terrestrial HD tuners? I saw this demo'd at CES in January, and it looks very nice.
Of course there's barely 4 channels worth of HD I'd want to record at once, but it's certainly a nice package. Like the other DirecTiVos, though, it does not have an MPEG encoder, so no cable or analog antenna inputs -- you're stuck with DirecTV and broadcast digital.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Not that the US is much better, but what kind of country tells you what you can and cannot use or subscribe to? Thats fascist.
This is actually one of the nice features of the DirecTivo units. Since they don't do any local MPEG encoding, the picture quality is great. Actually when compared to my other Directv receiver it was much better (but this could be due to my other receiver being of poor quality).
I have also used standalone tivo's though, and although I have noticed the pictures slightly modified, they seemed to be slightly different (the tivo had smoothing turned on), but again, neither was bad.
But for cost and ease of use, any tivo is better than a modified linux box. Unless, of course, you want to have your main linux machine near your tv (which I don't really want at all).
Tivo is available in Canada. It's just not allowed to be used. I purchased a Tivo, paid the duty, and then was told a month later that subscribing to DirecTv as a Canadian citizen was illegal. When I asked for my Duty to be refunded, they made it expressly clear that owning the tivo was legal... using it was not.
That's the status on DirecTV units in Canada.
Standalone TiVo's are perfectly legal to use, however TiVo's data service doesn't dial-in numbers in Canada nor do they bother to cover Canadian TV schedules and lineups. TiVo could offer that in Canada just fine, but they haven't bothered to.
I did a bit of research into this. As far as I can tell, the DirecTV/Canada issue has to do with the reception with sattelite signals, not with PVR's. I just want to hook this thing up to my local cable (preferably my digital cable, if at all possible, which many of us have up here)
On the contrary, Tivo seems quite hostile to the idea of selling Tivos in Canada. Once a national canadian radio station called up Tivo to ask about Tivo in canada, and their PR rep got angry about setting up an interview with Tivo under false pretences.
Does anyone know what Tivo's beef is with Canada?
All DirecTiVo (including HD), record the digital bit stream directly from the satellite onto the hard drive, so there is no degradation at all. The HD-TiVo added OTA (over-the-air) tuners for the local digital TV broadcasts and those bits are also sent directly to the hard drive. 19Mbits/sec is the maximum HD rate for OTA, while satellite/cable encodings of HD tend to be 13Mbits/sec or less.
In reading the initial comments about the HD-TiVo, there is one complaint that could be a problem for those who are currently using a DirecTV HD receiver like the DTC-100 and a non-HD DirecTiVo.
Apparently, when the HD-TiVo gets a non-HD signal, it doesn't automatically switch its output to 480i/480p. It also doesn't stretch/zoom the image to fill a 16x9 screen. This means you need to manually switch the output if you want your TV's de-interlacer/scaler to adjust the image. Depending on who you ask, this is a no-op, annoying, or fatal. (I'm probably in the annoying camp)
Dude, that's not even close to a Tivo.
The VIA chipset supports MPEG2 acceleration (offload of iDCT and Motion Compensation) *not* full HD decoding. So, you still need a lot of CPU horsepower to display HD - more than the 1GHz VIA C3 has to offer.
Beyond that, there is no way to hook an HDTV tuner to that board, not to mention the 2 Off The Air tuners the Tivo supports.
Then, you've got the DirecTV input.. The Tivo has 2 DirecTV tuners, while it's impossible to use DirecTV with a PC board.
Then, you've got the software. There are some decent PC PVR packages available. But, nothing up to the Tivo's level.
HDTV broadcast signals are by definition MPEG compressed at the TV station. Therefore, all the TiVo unit has to do is just record the already digital bitstream without having to decompress/recompess.
MPEG is designed as a processes that's computationally cheap to decode, which means that it's computationally expensive to encode. Basically, TV stations, networks, and signal providers have more expensive MPEG encoders than can ever be included in a consumer device, so they come up with more-bang-for-the-bandwidth. It'll always be better to just save that bitstream to an HD than to decompress and re-encode.
I received my unit 2 days ago and I must say that I don't love it. It is acceptable, but not anything to fall in love with.
TiVo really dropped the ball by not adding any new features or functionality, not even the HMO features. This is a stright port from the old version of TiVo software to support HDTV.
TiVo had the opportunity (and more than plenty of time) to make this product a huge leap the PVR game, but they seemed to have choose the safe route.
So for your $900 you get a TiVo that supports HDTV, but not much else.
I'm wondering if the poster or the editor even RTFA. I'm reading the forums, and most DO NOT love it. Most people are annoyed by it. They say it looks great, sure, but they say it is annoying to use in practice.
The big problem they are having is it doesn't switch native resolutions. Every time you change the channel or watch a new show that has been recorded, you have to change the output resolution. How many wives want to hit 10 buttons just to change the channel? Others are saying it isn't recording all of their season pass shows correctly.
They are optimistic, though, because the chips used in the TiVo should easily be able to fix the native res problem by a software update.
IANAL, but I play one on
Just buy a regular Tivo and check out tivocanada.com.
I have a Series 2 working quite well (98%). HMO option is the only issue outstanding.
I did pay for the lifetime subscription, I had no intentions of ripping Tivo off, I just wanted a working PVR. They get their money, and I get my PVR. I looks like I may, down the road, have to pay Zap2It for tv listings, but right now atleast they are free.
(And they now support a direct data option, no more webpage scraping).
[note fatal issues: HMO option (which I bought) is nice, but has a timeout if the unit doesn't call home, so far the methods to get the guide, etc, don't deal with that, so I have to have the unit actually call home, or that function stops working.).
Currently there are no 'movies'. The category doesn't work, known bug and will get fixed.]
Whatever the over-all reason, the ones you've described aren't them.
A tivo in Canada can generally call a local number to contact Tivo. No hacking of any required for it. There are local numbers in all major cities. I believe they contracted with UUNet, but whatever.
The IR Software works just fine with my Digital cable box. Canada uses pretty much the same electronics as the United States. There may be the odd difference, but it is the exception, not the rule.
I believe Tivo gets their guide data from Tribune, which, in my case is the source for Zap2It.com which is my source for tv listings.
The only technical issue with a Tivo in Canada that I can see is that we do not have zip-codes, instead we have Postal Codes, and this does complicate things a little on configuraing a Tivo, but the changes were made to support Tivo in the UK, so even those software changes are not a big deal.
The only real issue that could be holding Tivo out of the Canadian market is French language issues. Anything else has to be political issues.
There are some HDTV tuner cards available, which rely on DxVA acceleration for MPEG2 decoding. With a Radeon card, the bare minimum CPU is an 800MHz P3. With an Nvidia GeForce4 MX or FX Series (the other Nvidia cards don't do MPEG2 accel) it takes a 1.6GHz P4. Assuming the VIA chip's capabilities are somewhere between the Radeon & Nvidia chips, let's say it takes a 1GHz P3. From my experience with the Via C3, the preformance is around 1/2 of the performance of a P3 at the same clock speed. So, the C3 is not gonna cut HD decoding.
I use one of the FusionHDTV cards, with a 1.4GHz Celeron(Tualatin). It mostly works.. it will decode the HD pretty well, but have little hiccups a couple times per minute. Much too annoying for my tastes. I switched to a "MyHD" card, which has a hardware MPEG decoder instead. It could run with a 200MHz Pentium, as almost all of the processing is done on card.
DirecTV - That's the whole point of the Tivo mentioned in the article. It's sold as a DirecTV receiver, which also supports OTA reception. Without a valid DirecTV subscription, the OTA will not work.
As for seperating the cards in different boxes. That's fine, it will work. But, the net effect will be even less like a real Tivo. You have a problem of distributed recording/scheduling, and problems playing live tv when the card is in another system, file locking issues, etc.. (Yes, I have tried this with HD cards.) There may be some capability to do this with the various SD cards out there, but the HDTV equipment is not as flexible. At this point, there is only one HDTV card that is even operational in MythTV (pchdtv.com). It has beta level drivers, and alpha level integration into MythTV. Using it today is not just a DIY project, it's a software development project.
Any way you cut it, you currently can't make an HDTV PVR that compares to the Tivo. I've been trying to for the last 2 years, and while I've got a decent system for recording Off The Air HDTV, it doesn't come close to a Tivo. I will gladly toss my homebrew PVR in the closet and replace it with the Tivo.
You're a little late to the party to get one soon. Pre-order lists started a few months ago, and as far as anyone knows fewer than 200 shipped this week for the first time. It will probably be mid to late May before they start showing up on store shelves.
The Nano-ITX cpu/chipset from VIA also does HD mpeg decoding in hardware. Getting technical docs out of VIA is a blood/stone issue, but the existing community peeps have managed to get the SD HW mpeg decoder working, and you'd expect it to be substantially similar.... You'll need an HD MPEG capture card though because the chip's nowhere near fast enough to do it in software
Actually, if you combined that with a cable HD set top box with Firewire output, you could capture the MPEG transport stream with very little horsepower to disk, and use the HW decoder to playback. Voila, DIY HDTivo. As of April 1st, all cable companies are required to provide a Firewire port on their set top boxes to any customer that requests it. You get the raw transport stream fed directly from the Firewire, so there is no quality loss like you might have with an MPEG capture card.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/poll.php?s=&a ction=showresults&pollid=2255
Yes, but your non-HD TV signal is analog. For Tivo to store it, it has to convert it to digital, then encode it in real-time (which is never good for quality).
Besides that, Tivos encode to low-bitrate MPEG in order to save space. If you select the highest quality, it should be high enough that you won't notice any difference in quality.
HDTV is broadcast in MPEG2, so the Tivo just has to store it, losslessly, perfectly. So with HDTV, the signal from the TV will be just as good as one that is direct.
Interestingly enough, if you wanted a slightly lower-quality HDTV stream in order to save space, the Tivo should be able to do some MPEG2 tricks, like Requant, which will require practically no CPU power. If the company is smart, a Tivo is going to be a lot more like a TV studio, and less like a VCR.
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