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."

Comments

4 Tuners!

[unfortunateson]

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.

Re:4 Tuners!

[LostCluster]

Even though the unit has four tuners on board, only two can be active at any given moment. Anything more and they'd end up having too much data headed to the standard hard drive at once. Optimized-for-DVRs HDs are in the pipeline, so eventually this limitation will go away in future models.

There's really no content loss in not having an MPEG encoder on board. Nearly every analog channel is now being repeated digitally on their sister digital channel, or in most major markets DirecTV has an MPEG-translated version you can get access to.

This is the early adopter's model. There's going to be better ones in a few years.

Re:MPEG compression

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Waiting for this Slashdot headline...

[TrevorB]

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?

DirecTivo, HD-TiVo, and problems

[PenguinOpus]

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)

Huh?

[-tji]

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.

Re:MPEG compression

[LostCluster]

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 got one...

[burnsy]

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.

Re:I got one...

[MBCook]

TiVo did NOT drop the ball.

DirecTV won't allow HMO for some reason (there is a petition out there somewhere). NO DirecTiVo has HMO. It's not TiVo's fault, DirecTV is the one you've got a beef with. DirecTV is in total controll about what version of software it runs (verison 3.1.x probably) and many other things.

As for "adding any new features or functionality", like what? I've got a second generation DirecTiVo (Phillips DSR-7000) and other than HMO, I can't think of anything that I'd like it to have. The only thing that I wish it had was more memory and a faster processor, which I assume that the new box has.

They added HDTV and you can still record two programs at once (even two HDTV programs at once). What big stuff could you want other than that?

As for the $900, for that you get a TiVo that can hold 200 hours of SD ($99 dollar TiVo plus about $250 for upgrade from 9thTee), a HDTV reciever DirecTV reciever ($300 for a Samsung from BestBuy). That's $650. But you can record TWO things at once, so throw in a second HDTV reciever to make things fair (another $300) and now we're up to $1050. Of course all this stuff is in one nice little box so you don't need nearly as many cables. The box could be considered a $150 SAVINGS over the equivelent other equiptment only it's all in one and does things that the above stuff can't (like TiVo HDTV content).

They love it?

[boarder]

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.

Re:Waiting for this Slashdot headline...

[topham]

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.

So far, they do love it

[Bryan Ischo]

There is now a poll in response to this Slashdot article. See:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/poll.php?s=&a ction=showresults&pollid=2255

Re:MPEG compression

[evilviper]

Because of the MPEG compression, there is a noticable quality difference between my (non-HD) TV on the TiVo and bypassing the TiVo to watch TV directly.

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.