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HDTV TiVo Now Shipping

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the never-looked-better dept.

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."

5 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. HD Porn by scifience · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now all we need are the HD porn channels to go with it! Buy it once, watch it again (and again) later!

  2. Re:Waiting for this Slashdot headline... by Quasar1999 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    So, go ahead and buy a tivo, you won't be allowed to use it, but it is technically available in canada...

    --

    ---
    Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
  3. Re:MPEG compression by Gilesx · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Here's how to access a "hidden" Tivo mode, which gives you a much improved picture. Perhaps this is enabled for HDTV (although the resolution would *still* be too low)

    http://www.ljay.org.uk/tivoweb/tivo_fpga.html

    --
    Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
  4. DirecTivo, HD-TiVo, and problems by PenguinOpus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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)

  5. Huh? by -tji · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.