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

I prefer my ReplayTV to my old Media Center PCs

[iibbmm]

I have owned two Media Center PCs, and currently use two 5504 ReplayTV's as my main PVR units.

The Media Center PCs were of course the most powerfull units, but they had problems. It was a real pain to get everything working with my Toshiba HD set, as it was finicky about resolutions, and getting everything stable was a pain. I ended up selling both of my attempts at Media Pcs, and got a replay tv.

The replay is PERFECT. Everyone in the house can use it without issue, and everything is fluid. There is no need to spend hour after hour customizing and tweaking software to get everything work with something else, no crashes, nothing out of the ordinary.

The key components I miss from the HTPCs are the music playback, web browsing, and gaming on the big screen. However, I have a wireless media streamer that I use for music, and I prefer to play games in my office anyway, so the loss of functionality is minimal. I didn't use my HTPC to play pirated films, as I can't stand the look of divx/xvid at 57".

Propaganda

[TexTex]

It seems like all three have various nice features but all three also have negatives that you have to suffer through.

Um...from reading the article (and I'd hope our submitter did, as he's the first feedback post praising the author)...you'll see how most of it defends the MS box on a point-by-point basis of what Tivo offers.

To me, it reads like 'We can do everything Tivo can do better...' It's a response to Pogue's praise of Tivo with praise of his own. A fair comparison, a blogger's thoughts on DVRs, and a waste of slashdot's frontpage.