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TiVo to Aim for PC Desktop
Dave writes "Ars Technica has reported on TiVo's fourth quarter earnings call, and I was interested to see that the company is looking at providing some kind of desktop service for computers." The details are pretty sparse, so it'll be intriguing to see what they've got planned.
Or...you could use free applications and not buy Microsoft Media Center. Duh!
TiVo's load balancing, season passes, key phrase searches, etc. kick the snot out of anything else. Quite a bit of what makes it so nice is patented.
If you haven't used one, you don't have the experience to know you don't know what you don't know.
Long time TiVo competitor, ReplayTV, has had a PC interface for some time now by means of an open source JAVA program called DVArchive. With it, user's of LAN enabled ReplayTV's can stream recorded shows onto their PC's. DVArchive can even act as a virtual ReplayTV, serving up shows for all the real ones in the house. If this is what TiVo has planned, it sounds like they are playing catch-up.
"If you haven't used one, you don't have the experience to know you don't know what you don't know."
:30 hack on TiVo.
I've used TiVo for over four years now, both standalone and the combo DirecTV/TiVo units.
I can assure you that Microsoft MCE is every bit as good as TiVo. To-do-list, recording history, season passes (with first-run-only options, the same 31-day rule, automatic adjustment to changing schedules, etc.), and most of the other TiVo featureset is present.
The only things I can think of that TiVo has over MCE is:
- WishLists. MCE kind of has them with keyword searching, but TiVo does a much better job.
- Suggestions. I never used them, but only TiVo has them.
But:
- MCE has better conflict resolution. The interface is clearer. The to-do-list shows, at a glance, which shows "lose out" in a conflict.
- MCE is faster. Even the Series 2 units are far too slow. Particularly when you upgrade the disk space. My 300GB MCE box is still quite nippy.
- MCE has a better skip back / skip forward feature. It's far faster, which actually makes it useful - unlike the
- MCE handles failure better. If a show is interrupted during recording, MCE will automatically schedule a later showing if it's available and doesn't cause a conflict. This happens even if the recording was one-shot.
- MCE softpads automatically, and unlike TiVo's padding, softpadding doesn't create conflicts.
- MCE's interface is better. You can see the current program in most of the menus, and there is a clearly defined "back" button with unlimited history.
Try MCE out before you go crapping all over it. You may be surprised.