TiVo vs Microsoft vs HDTV Cable

Thomas Hawk writes "Technology writer Ed Bott is out today with a great comparison piece where he compares the various feature sets of his TiVo, his Microsoft Media Center PC and his current HDTV cable DVR. It seems like all three have various nice features but all three also have negatives that you have to suffer through. A great read and strong comparison piece for anyone interested in DVR technology. Would love to see Ed or someone else expand on this piece and incorporate the current HDTV DirecTV TiVo, Comcast's Foundation box being rolled out in a pilot program in Washington State and MythTV."

Comments

Whoa, put down the crack pipe dude.

[silicon not in the v]

I got a good laugh out of this dose of fanboyism from his "review".

(about TiVo)What's really cool is that, for a given channel, you can scroll both forward into the future [...] and into the past

MCE's guide doesn't look into the past, but it works just fine when looking at the future. MCE also offers [ unrelated features to distract from this shortcoming]

So then his conclusion at the end:

Bottom line? Feature for feature, Windows XP Media Center Edition matches TiVo and even exceeds it in some measures.

Add to that his earlier comment about the recordable buffer TiVo has, "MCE keeps a similar buffer but doesn't allow you to save it." So the new definition of "matches and even exceeds" for all features apparently now means that some features match, some are missing, and some are extra. So I wonder if those MCE systems are just on loan from MS or if they were part of his compen$ation package.