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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."
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.
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
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.