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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."
Smart offers. If you bail out of watching a recorded show within a few minutes of the end, TiVo asks if you want to delete the recording to free up hard drive space. That's smart; it's assuming that since you're near the end, you've probably watched all you intend to watch. (If you cancel playback in the middle or beginning, though, TiVo doesn't bother you with that offer; it assumes you're not finished with the show yet.)
I don't know if they were talking negatively about the lack of an option to delete if you bail out in the middle of playback or not but, honestly, it's not difficult to delete any recording from the main menu... For most of the shows I watch I have them setup to delete when space is needed. The shows that I absolutely MUST watch get watched or marked later with "do not delete until I say".
I would actually find it relatively annoying if I jumped out of playback in the middle of a show and it asked if I wanted to delete. That's an unnecessary step that I'd have to take.
That's my opinion though, YMMV, perhaps a more detailed configuration of these settings would help TiVo? "Do you want to be prompted to delete if aborting playback before the end?" (something less wordy but you get the idea).
Bottom line? Feature for feature, Windows XP Media Center Edition matches TiVo and even exceeds it in some measures.
Bottom line? You need to have a dedicated machine for the MCE and a TV in/out card plus you need something that's half-decent in speed. TiVo just works and it was cheap (for me). You also need to support Microsoft and personally, as much as I am not terribly happy w/TiVo's recent decisions, I'd prefer to pay them than MSFT.
I honestly believe that if Tivo wants to win they should allow shell access to the box and release development APIs so people can write their own Tivo applications. This will allow third party companies to create and support Tivo solutions and would bring popularity back to the device. If you hack a cable box you get a visit from the FBI. Microsoft will never be open. This is where Tivo can win. Hopefully they wake up and sieze the opportunity.
My mom surprised me one day saying she ordered the HD DVR from Comcast (which runs Microsoft software). It is like $5/month or something like that, and there was no up front purchase. I was horrified, someone between those two companies could be nothing less than spawn of the devil. Well, as usual, the installation experience was bad (I've never had a good install from Comcast), because their software servers were having problems and it took a few hours to download the software. After that, however, I was amazed at how much better it was than I expected. The interface is nothing to call home about, but at least it loads and moves pretty fast. The thing that impressed me the most was the HDTV recording ability. You are able to record two HD streams and watch another at the same time! I tried scrubbing through some HD shows we recorded and it was smooth at any speed I tried, it fast forwarded better than any digital content I have seen and even VHS tapes... and this was high definition content.
Another that I appreciate is that it doesn't put ads on screen when you pause video, you can see exactly what you want to. It also doesn't assume what you are interested in and try recording shows it thinks you would like. Probably my biggest gripe is that it doesn't know what channels you don't get (which is probably Comcast's fault). It'll dispaly a bunch of channels while browsing the channels, but we don't get half of them. Not only does it take more time to scroll, but I have also tried recording shows that are on a channel we don't get. Since it doesn't know better, it silently tries to record it, yet nothing shows up. It would be nice if it could give us a warning. I have yet to see a show we weren't able to record (although, if it starts happening when the broadcast flag comes out, I'll have my parents return it).
Last Sunday I set it to record the Oscars, and then I fast forwarded through at super speed and just watched the good parts. That was very handy.
It also has firewire output, but I have yet to try transferring the shows to my PowerBook (using a utility that saves HD streams from firewire). I'd really like to do this so I can save all the IMAX movies on the INHD channels for a long period of time.
Andrew
... over Tivo. We bought an UltimateTV reciever from Radio Shack (*gasp!*) about five years ago. Since then, my wife's mom upgraded from a basic DirecTV unit to a DirecTivo unit, and we have had plenty of time to use it, and we were so frustrated by the Tivo's limitations that we immediately went on eBay and bought a couple more used UTV units for spare parts and backup units. While not as hackable as a Tivo (you can upgrade the hard drive), the basic functionality is equal to a Tivo, the guide appears and scrolls far faster, the 30-second skip works perfectly, it's got the predictive resume everyone has been raving about in this discussion, and we actually like the fact it does NOT guess what we want to watch and fill up our hard drive unless we ask it to do so. And oh, yes, it does allow us to specify not to record duplicates, etc. One big plus - the Tivo's max fast forward speed only seems to be about 8x real time. The UTV will do 300x fast forward and rewind.
Unfortunately, nobody sells these units new anymore; apparently Microsoft decided to put its eggs in the MCE basket instead.
We looked at the HDTV version of the DirecTivo, and it was even worse than the basic DirecTivo.
We won't be able to use the UTV boxen with HDTV, but then we don't watch TV so much that it really bothers us, and besides we are too far from a major market to get over-the-air HDTV anyway.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
cable box DVR is cheapest 5-10 a month, no up front
tivo is cheap in the short run. $100 up front plus 12.95 a month
MSFT media PC expensive $500+ up front. cheapest HP mcpc = $549 plus shipping, no ongoing cost for programming guide.
Myth TV sw no cost, hw expensive up front similar $500+ for computer, no ongoing fee.
You won't be able to transfer those shows.
There's a little thing called 5C or HDCP protection that flags shows as "copy once", "copy never", or "copy always". Unless the show is "copy always", the set top box will refuse to unencrypt the show for your Mac. It will only send them to an "approved" recording device like a HD-DVR that will them store them as "copy never". Think there will ever be an "approved" recording program or card for a PC/Mac? Nope. Never.
The only channels that are usually copy always are the "must carry" over the air networks like ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, etc. INHD will probably be "copy once" in your area (it is in my area).
5C is similar in function to the broadcast flag. You're getting a sneak preview of what the broadcast flag will mean.
The broadcast flag is slightly different in that it involves the FCC. But the 5C racket already has the US government providing muscle with the DCMA (illegal to circumvent the encryption).
-Ryan C.
The inability to decode DirecTV on a PC is the big killer for me as well. DirecTivos record the compressed signal from the satellite directly and then decode it when you watch it. Any standalone solution would have to decode the satellite signal via the satellite receiver box then reencode it for storage. You either have to reencode at a reasonable bitrate and deal with more artifacts from transcoding or encode at a really high bitrate to preserve as much of the (already lossily encoded) signal as possible.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
As very poor former TiVo user and current Myth user, I can't say that I recommend doling out the cash for a dedicated Myth system, but I have been able to turn my two piece-of-shit machines into a functioning myth system. The backend is an hp 1GHz P3 machine with an el cheapo Pinnacle capture card ($80 at CompUSA in 2002) running FC3. This machine became a linux box a little more than a month ago when my win2k install ate its own registry and I couldn't scrounge up a copy of a wndows OS to reinstall. The frontend is a gateway 400Mhz PII running KnoppMyth that I bpught from a friend for $80 a cuouple years ago. I recently replaced the original 2GB harddrive with a 40 gig scavenged from an unused DirecTivo. Anyhow, the system is great, cheap (for me), and I was able to get it all running an incompetent n00b.
i forget
Heh...I like the implied comment in the question: "didn't have the patience to dink with it"...as in, patience is a virtue, and lack of same is a fault.
It's not a fault to want something to just plug in and go after you spend a lot of money on it.
I 'dink with' a Linux box most evenings. I use MEPIS Linux, among the most plug-and-play distros ever developed. And the new version recently cost me most of a weekend with tedious, stupid stuff like not working with my new DVD writer and not being able to record audio because the ALSA controls are a whole separate level from the KMIX controls and they BOTH have to have "line' turned on.
And I am morally CERTAIN that setting up a MythTV box is the same deal, squared and cubed. The commentary from MythTV fans, both on the web and at the Calgary Unix Users Group that I chair, is clear on that point. It only "just goes" if you have just the right hardware and the Gods smile that day.
As for Linux never crashing, I don't mean full-blown BSOD; it just has to lock up for a few seconds to totally annoy most people. Now then, kindly put "mythTV freeze" into google and peruse the first few links. Then try "freeze pioneer "DVR-520" ' and note that while there are pages with both terms in them, none involve the product locking up. Some DVD players have frozen just playing a disk - a disk that a different player might handle. But none of the consumer-electronics products freeze when playing from the hard drive.
Then don't get me started on my TV being useless for one weekend a year when I decide that it's time to upgrade my MythTV version...
Bottom line: I get all the geeking and dinking my soul needs from playing with my general-purpose computer. I really tear my hair out on that a lot. Despite being committed to good old solid "uncrashable" Linux. I don't need any more of it when I'm just trying to knock back a few, get into a state of mind where I'm incompetent to handle complexity, and....watch TV.
Oh, yeah, forgot one point. My parts list for the proposed MythTV box ran $1500 Cdn. The DVR was $750 . Half the price for, I repeat, 80% of the functionality.
Yes, yes, the two aren't comparable. The MythTV box would have had a top-end burner, a 200GB hard drive, the Hauppage 350 top-end video capture, and a $150 sound card that did 7.1 digital sound.
But honestly? I wouldn't have used most of that functionality except on "Star Wars" type heavy-sound movies. And it all would have been obsolete in 3 years when HDTV is mainstream.
So will the DVR be, but I'll only have spent half as much on it. In 3 years, MythTV will be much more stable and featureful, and a MythTV box that can digitize HDTV (if content controls even allow that) will probably be under $1500 - and I'll still have half that much unspent in the bank.