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TiVo Unveils Series3 HDTV DVR
MegaZone writes "TiVo unveiled their new Series3 unit at CES yesterday. The Series3 is a digital cable ready box, capable of recording two programs simultaneously. It supports cable and antenna input, and it can handle digital or analog cable, digital ATSC, or analog NTSC broadcasts. CableCARD is used for digital cable, and it can utilize a single multi-stream card, or two single-stream cards. The system also sports 2 USB ports, 10/100baseT Ethernet, and an E-SATA port for external storage expansion. Video output is HDMI, component, S-Video, and composite, and audio is optical digital or RCA stereo."
Appears that I might look into tivo now, since it finally caught my interest!
Finally I can get rid of the two piece of garbage Comcast DVRs. I still have to use my old series 2 tivo to guarantee that I can get a show recorded. With 2 comcast DVRs it is crap shoot as to if they actually record. I have been waiting for this.
About freakin' time TiVo!!!!
I love my series 2 and all, but honestly i've really been itching for the cable card based series 3 units since i've heard about them.
Hooray for dual tuners in a non-dtivo! hooray for easy expantion too! i just hope these badboys don't cost as much as the hd dtivos...
I have a Tivo, and while I know I could build a MythTV I like the "near idiot proof" nature of the little box so I can let my wife use it to tape her shows (American Idol) while I tape my shows (MythBusters) and our shows and then had to hunt for a USB compatible network device, all I could think was "WTF? Why not spend $10 on Ethernet?"
The other thing I'm very pleased about is the inclusion of the Cablecard option - this gives Tivo a chance to complete with cable boxes - though local Cox has let people know that while you can use the cablecard, it won't be able to get movies on demand.
Ah, and I was so hoping to see "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalo". Somehow, I think I'll survive. WIth the ability to plug in external drives, this has seriously upset my plans to convert my spare PC into a Tivo replacement once the service on the current box runs out in October.
Of course, there's always the possibility Apple will introduce something - but if they do introduce a PVR/Media device, I'm going to expect it to have the same capabilities down to the cablecard that this new Tivo does before I consider it.
Eh - I'm patient. I have 10 months to wait and see.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
As I recall, Tivo unveiled their first prototype of a cablecard enabled, HDTV capable DVR at CES 2 years ago. I would have been ready to buy such a creature at the time.
Obviously, the current model looks leaps and bounds ahead of what they originally put forth. I love the display on the front that shows what both tuners are recording. (Although no more sneaking recordings of shows my wife doesn't know I watch, and doesn't think I have time for.) However, I can't help but think that they missed out on a significant piece of the market as people have resigned themselves to using cable company provided DVRs for HDTV. It doesn't help that cablecard implementation at most cable companies is still pretty buggy, and not used widely enough to get debugged thoroughly too quickly.
My bet is that this unit will succeed or fail (and the company with it) depending on how much marketing muscle Comcast puts behind it as part of their alliance with Tivo. Of course, I'm still likely to buy one, as the HD-DVR Time Warner provides for me is horribly buggy...
-JMP
Your kidding yourself right? Have you ever had a TiVo? They are wonderful and their userbase is extremly loyal. With the addition of easy storage expansion and digital cable these are going to sell like hotcakes.
Unfortunatly for TiVo this doesn't nessesarily mean more money as they sell their boxes fo little profit and make the money on subscription fees, meaning existing loyalties won't make them much money. On the other hand existing tivo users might be inclinded to give their tivos to friends and family and possibly pay for a few months of service long enough to get them hooked.
Yes, but does it fly?
It's nice that it has Ethernet, but can you do anything useful with it or will it be heavily DRM'ed?
What about the data on the USB disk--is it encrypted or is it readable and usable MPEG files?
Unfortunately I decided to take advantage of the savings and try out a new Tivo system for the first time. A new product such as this though will most likely grow their userbase even more because of the ease of use created by the added features.
It's been fun dabbling with Tivo's HME. Getting Google Maps on my Tivo via my desktop PC, playing with newsfeeds, etc. This site has some interesting HME Apps listed, http://hme.pvrblog.com/
Now, with the new Series 3 Tivo, what will developers really be able to do with a new HME...or does Tivo have little interest in opening up more to the developer community?
Does this allow you to record two HD shows at once, only to have to delete them after 90 minutes?
I take it they still want me to pay $400 for a lifetime subscription or $14 per month? Yet, not allow me to export my recordings without using their proprietary app? No, thanks. I'll stick with my http://www.elgato.com/index.php?file=products_eyet v500
I do have a mythtv box that I love to death. The price is right, and it's not larded with DRM, etc. That suits my needs.
For other people who are not so concerned, why would I go to the expense of purchasing this + subscription fee when the cable company will give me one that (as far as Joe User knows / cares) does the same thing for $3.50 per month. Tivo can not compete, they are as good as dead.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
That's what I hope to see...a trade-in program. I'd happily turn in my 2 Series 2 DVRs for a discount on 2 Series 3. Sure, TiVo can't reuse the parts but maybe they can sell them in 3rd world countries where even cable TV is a gift from the gods. Or since the TiVo is just a Linux box they can change the software a little to make them educational and donate them as a tax write off. Who wants a $100 laptop when you can get a TiVo plus "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing" (though it may be difficult to master with the peanut shaped remote)?
I'm not quite sure what your point is. I have a series 1 Tivo (Sony unit from the year 2000). It has 100BaseT ethernet. I bought the ethernet card and plugged it in. No problems.
Incidentally - why does everybody feel the need to list the TV programmes they like to record? It's like music stories - with those people always seem to like to post the "artists" they like. Why? It's a waste of space.
Now I'm using Cox DVR. While the interface isn't as nice as TiVo, I have the ability to record two shows at once. Which comes in handy for my wife. And like you said, its only $3.50 month without taking up any more space.
Unless Elgato has found a way to crack QAM encryption of most cable tv shows worth recording, then this is your own solution.
Comcast and TiVo has a deal that starts mid-2006 to market TiVo DVRs to Comcast customers.
http://news.com.com/TiVo,+Comcast+reach+DVR+deal/2 100-1041_3-5616961.html
Any markets support CableCard yet?
I guess its just living in Canada, which sometimes sits in the stoneage when it comes to certain technology. TIVO has never been available up here, only what the monopolies Rogers (Cable) and Bell(Phone/Satellite) see fit to offer us Canucks.
While Rogers PVR features 2 input recording and is mostly a decent device (the Acientific Atlanta Explorer 8300), I really wish for more competition in the PVR/Digital Cable box market, allowing me to select more robust solutions like DVD/HDD recorders with support for digital cable and HDTV content.
Sony was, I believe, the first to offer CableCard support in their televisions, but I think that Rogers or Bell are so far way from releasing their tight grip of control of digital cable that Canada won't see a cable card solution for at least another decade. In the meantime, some dumb Canadian is paying $1000 more for a Sony TV with a feature they will never use. We are still waiting for even a TIVO like solution where we can subscribe to a third party service for cable recording.
I hope this new Tivo product is hugely successful in the US (as I am sure it will be). Given how much US technology and television market influences Canadians, perhaps if the CRTC (Central Repression of Technology for Canadians) starts getting more complaints about the anti-competitive behaviour of Rogers and Bell and the fact TIVO has never gotten a foothold in Canada, I am sure huge success of a CableCard supported device like this new TIVO will drive Canada to adopt the technology and open up the market sooner rather then later.
In the meantime, after paing $400 for a featurless Rogers PVR and $5/mth to support PVR capabilities on the device, I guess I have to be a good Canadian and ignore my repression and apologize for my bitching.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
You people just don't realize that the draw of TiVo is really their value-added stuff that even the cable-company DVRs don't have. Also, once you get used to the TiVo, you feel like you're *missing something* on other offerings.
First, TiVo *just works*, and it works well for everything it is supposed to do. No tweaking required.
Second, the cable-company DVRs don't support home networking (while MythTV would, of course), and it is very nice to have TiVos in multiple rooms, or be able to play MP3s on TiVo, transfer stuff around, or use other value-added Internet-enabled "stuff" they're constantly adding.
Third, other options only record "exactly what you tell them to", and nothing more. While this may seem ok, one gets very easily addicted to TiVo's tendency to also record things it thinks you might want to watch (and sometimes do), but havn't explicitly told it to record.
Oh, and you can also do nifty things like schedule recordings over the internet, and even check the available recording list on your TiVo remotely.
(Ok, MythTV can do some of these things, but from the demos I saw, it required far too much "tweaking" for me to feel comfortable "trusting" it to always get my shows reliably recorded, and recorded without reruns and such. I actually do also have a MythTV box, but I use it for playing computer-stored video files and running game emulators.)
Most likely it will be exactly like the Series 2 DVRs -- You can copy recorded files from it to your computer, but need the special TiVo Player to watch them.
/syle
I just hope the new Comcast DVR's are basically Series 3 Tivo's with a Comcast label. Then it would be worth paying Comcast $5-$10 a month for a DVR.
Stupid poster(s). Could you please tell us exactly which USB disk you're even talking about? There's no mention of USB disks anywhere in the article. SATA, yes, but not USB.
Eh - I'm patient. I have 10 months to wait and see.
:) )
I've got even longer; I don't expect to be able to justify the cost of this monster 'til it drops down into a range slightly closer to what I paid for my current standalone unit, especially since my lifetime subscription on the standalone unit's not transferrable. (It's not that I don't yet have an HD monitor yet-- the big reason I don't is because I've been waiting for affordable HD Tivo.
One of the things I love about my current Tivo is Tivo-to-go. I wonder if this new monster will support that?
-JDF
Thanks, you just saved me some cash! I won't bother with getting a tivo if I can't use mplayer.
After 4 or 5 restarts we wanted to smash the thing into little bits and pieces, Office Space style.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Considering the pictures show the option to transcode your recordings for use on a PSP, video iPod, or Windows Media Library, I'd assume it would pump out the transcoded files via the ethernet port (wow, takes so much brainpower to figure this out). DRM'd? Possibly, but since it transcodes, not necessarily. Watermarked? Most definitely. Also, there is no USB disk.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
TiVo is porting their software to the Motorola 6412 platform, as well as a 'new' Motorola platform that hasn't been specified yet. (Perhaps one of the new DVR cable boxes they announced at CES today.)
Incidentally - why does everybody feel the need to list the TV programmes they like to record You know I always wondered about that too. You don't see me running around telling you what kind of toilet paper I use (Charmin) or anti-perspirant I use (Arid). Maybe there should be a study done on this kind of behavior. But I have a feeling they have no friends and are trying to make some on the net by spouting out shows that seem to be popular with all the other losers.
But does it have commercial skip?
I've been a very satisfied owner of a DirecTV UltimateTV reciever since they first came out. About a year ago we got a Tivo for my live-in mother-in-law (since you cannot buy new UTVs anymore). We were very unhappy to discover that Tivo killed the commercial skip feature (at least, without resorting to a hack that is lost every time the power blinks). And the Tivo's maximum fast forward speed seems quite slower than the 300x UTV forward speed.
The commercial skip feature, in my opinion, makes the UTV far nicer than the Tivo. It just works, and it means I don't have to see ANY of a commercial, instead of watching some Tivo-imposed advertisement superimposed on my fastforward thru another advertisement that I also didn't want to see in the first place.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
though local Cox has let people know that while you can use the cablecard, it won't be able to get movies on demand.
From TFA:
The unit has two CableCARD slots on the back and it will support Multi-Stream (CableCARD 2.0) or Single-Stream (CableCARD 1.0) cards.
Now, those cards that do not support Video on Demand are the 1.0 spec cards; if you don't believe me then go ahead and crawl the damned Opencable site like I did for a whole day. And if you don't believe that, believe Wikipedia:
The new CableCARD 2.0 standard supports high definition digital cable and two way features such as Pay-Per-View, Video On Demand, and advanced electronic programming guide information.
That's what's really exciting about this box. Scientific Atlanta and Motorola watch out; people will be dumping your boxes en masse.
Tivo has a potentially bright future:
Tivo also has a patent lawsuit against Dish Networks that takes place in March. Some analyst are saying there is a high probability Tivo will win this one.
Tivo also sold out of product on Amazon (made it all the way up to #7 in the top 10 holiday electronics sales list.) Subscriber base is still growing.
IPTV and internet content will probably make TiVo a great convergence box for those who don't want a PC next to their TV.
Comcast is paying Tivo to port its software to the OCAP platform, where it will be able to run on half a dozen DVRs. Tivo gets a small subscriber fee and Tivo and Comcast split revenue from Tivo's advertising search service.
With the magic of DirectShow Dump any player that can read MPEG2 can be used, and that includes burning to DVD.
My HR10-250 is getting installed tomorrow. But I hate how DirecTV is stripping all the cool HME options from their Tivo-powered boxes. So to me this upcoming series 3 Tivo powered by DirecTV would be a killer TV product.
By the way, $600 is NOT the going price for the DirecTV HDTivo if you are a good DirecTV customer, see this thread for details on getting that price down. My cost was more like $200 after rebates and service credits. I'm fully expecting this device to be obsolete within a year, but to me it is worth it for $200.
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That they will shell out $DOLLARS for one of these behemoths? So you can record the Superbowl and Desparate Housewives at the same time? So you can wire it into your home network, and have instant access to all of the DVDs and CDs that you bought and carefully ripped to your home terabyte SAN? Do people no longer read books, play Uno, or throw frisbee with their dogs? Go to neighborhood bars to watch sports games?
I don't see it. Of course the geek factor is high, so it will likely be talked up much on Slashdot and in some circles, and eventually, Joe Walmart will buy them when they have to upgrade their TVs else they fall behind, but is there really a compelling reason for this? We're SWIMMING in media these days, barraged by content, and look at the results - dumbing down of everything, even the Discovery Channel, kids with no reading or writing skills, no attention span, etc. etc.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Again, if you look at the pics in the article (there's really no excuse, they have mirrors all over the place) you'll see a screenshot of TivoToGo being used on the Series 3.
Here's to hoping that isn't the final color scheme...
"Powers. I have them."
And how often does your power blip out? Just punch in the code and your back with your commercial skip.
Remeber the whole Tivo2Go fiasco last year? How long after it was announced did it take for Tivo customers to actually get access to the feature. I'm impressed by the specs but it probably won't be available for sale until 2007.
I'm still stuck with my series 1 Tivo - we didn't even get the Series 2 Tivo's over here in the UK! I won't be holding my breath for these new series 3's ...
Agreed, this is why I have the DirecTivo which is only 5 dollars a month. Sadly DirecTV is now offering their own box and rumors are that in 2 years the TiVo boxes won't work anymore, at that time I may go with the new series 3 if I can afford it.
...is the blasted latency.
I was lucky enough to be given a TiVO(forgot the series), hacked to 80 gigs, and Ethernet,etc. While it is nice to be able to pause live tv, the only thing I didn't like was the latency with pressing buttons on the cable box.
You try to punch in 040 and you get 0 4 2 seconds later showing up on the TV. I would say 60% of my channel changes were unsuccesful due to the cable box's timeouts. I thought the batteries were bad in my remote control. So I bypassed the tivo entirely, and it switched channels just fine, nice & fast.
Is there a way to turn off "pausable tv" and just push the video straight through? I can live without it. I just wish when I did a plain(ie not scheduled) recording it didn't stop after a half hour. BTW I have no tiVo service. Just using it as a VCR.
You insensitive clod, I use Secret.
I just took the plunge to HDTV the other day. In setting all this up, I would like to pass along what I have learned thus far. It has been an interesting trip, to say the least and I have learned that there is a LOT of hype around HDTV that is probably not quite warranted yet.
I subscribe to basic extended analog cable. I get locals plus standard cable content (Comedy central, lifetime, etc). No premium channels. I have this cable feed running through my Series 1 Tivo and from the Tivo, into my A/V receiver - which outputs the picture only to my TV. In this mode, the TV is essentially a monitor.
I also have a PC w/ Meedio hooked up to this. I used to use the S-video to an old analog TV and that worked ok. Once I hooked it up to my HDTV (TV has PC/VGA in), words can not describe how much of an improvement that makes. The PC has a Soundblaster Live! on it and digital optical out to the A/V receiver....more on that piece later.
The 3rd device I have is a DVD player (Philips DVP-642). Audio is coax digital. Video is components. Both Audio and video feed into my A/V receiver. My receiver has components in and out to the HDTV.
Now that you have an idea of the setup I use, let me lay out some issues I have run into that the Tivo3 may simplify.
1. Of all the devices I have hooked up, my PC w/ Meedio looks the best. And so do all of my downloaded movies and shows. Most of the rips I have are in HDTV and that seems to be the standard nowadays. Why is this important? Because the old "downloaded videos sacrifice quality" no longer holds true. It may not be as good as upscaled DVD's but it is MORE than reasonable.
2. My soundcard sucks. The optical out only outputs stereo sound. I think it will pass through Dolby and DTS but who cares -- that's what my DVD is for. THIS IS A VERY BIG DEAL IF YOU WANT SURROUND SOUND out of your PC. Get a card that can output 5.1 on the fly. As I understand it, most Creative products ONLY output stereo through the digital out. (note: they may "pass thru" DTS/DD but that is different). I wound up ordering a Turtle Beach Montego. Haven't set it up yet.
3. There is very limited HDTV content available. Over-the-Air (antennas), I can pick up all the major networks. Another alternative is to go w/ DirecTV -- but if you subscribe to them, you only get about 2-3 extra channels (I don't count preview channels, etc) more than an antenna. For Dish, its a little bit better -- you get about 4-5 extra channels. Same with Cable. The Point: Each of the above costs an extra $10-$15/mo. And for that, you get at most, 4-5 extra "real" channels that you couldn't get by just sticking an antenna behind your TV.
4. I just ordered a CableCard from my provider (Cox). This allows me to keep my standard "analog" cable that feeds my Tivo while at the same time, allowing me to view the 5-8 HDTV channels that are available. If I had a Tivo3, I could just slap that card into my Tivo3 instead of using my Tivo 1 (for analog) + HDTV tuner on TV set. The Tivo 3 will record whatever you throw at it (HDTV, standard digital, analog, etc) in one nice, neat, little box.
I hope this is helpful to people. There is a lot to think about on how to set things up and these are the major issues that I ran into. I think the biggest disappointment I see is the lack of HDTV content. Just go look at the HD offerings from Dish or DirecTV and you will see that it is very minimal. Perhaps that will change with time but I definitely have that "pay more for less" feeling with respect to my cable/sat bill.
So, if you want to record HDTV, you have the following options:
a) Build a PC w/ HDTV card and use an antenna (unless your HDTV capture card supports CableCard)
b) Build a PC w/ HDTV capture card and use the cable company's Cable box to tune. Note: consider the remote control implications if you choose this. Changing channels = change channels on Cable box.
c) Use the cable companies HDTV DVR (@ $15/mo from Cox. YMMV)
d) USE A TIVO3 w/ CableCard (simplest, easiest, hopefully cheapest)
Hope this helps others who decide to take the plunge.
The competition from the cable companies sucks so much I don't even know where to begin. Here's a letter I wrote when I had to use a so called dvr from a cable company while moving:
+++++
To: Grande Communications - Customer Service, Marketing, Business Development, CEO
Subject: Good lord your DVR offering sucks.
I've seen some bad user interfaces over the years and the one featured on your scientific atlanta dvr is pretty much the worst i've ever seen. Where one button would suffice it forces you to use 3. Or sometimes 4. I challenge you to schedule a recording of Sponge Bob Square Pants for two days in the future. With TiVo it's trivial, with your device it is impossible. Forget about attempting to set up something equivalent to a Season Pass. Come on, are you really serious about this product? I suppose the charge to my bank account indicates that you sadly are. Has anyone in your management actually tried to use the device. Or do they all just have TiVo and assume that all DVRs are the same? If so then they are woefully out of touch.
I have to use your crappy offering since my apartment does not have a southern view. But be assured, once I move I will be resuming my DirecTV subscription and continue to use my 2 year old DirecTV dual-tuner TiVo.
+++++
Now I didn't actually send it since I was busy moving. But now... humm....
I have a series 1 Tivo (Sony unit from the year 2000). It has 100BaseT ethernet. I bought the ethernet card and plugged it in.
I had a couple of Series 1 boxes too, and bought the ethernet cards as well.
They're 3rd party accessories that were hacked onto the proprietary expansion slot inside S1 TiVos. There is no such expansion slot on the S2s, and I doubt there is on the S3s. They cost $70 vs ~$10 for a USB adapter and aren't trivial to install (not horribly difficult, but if you're not comfy opening your computer and replacing parts then stay far, far away from opening up TiVos). The last software release on a S1 TiVo was a couple years ago, so you cannot get any of the latest features -- there are hacks available to replace some of those features (and add others), but those hacks are available on the S2s now as well -- plus you get a vastly faster unit and the updated software.
That's what the point is.
I very much agree with the OP -- it's about time they added an ethernet jack. Having to use a USB dongle was silly. It's good that they kept the USB ports though, since a lot of people will want wireless.
Oh sure....I haven't even had my brand spankin' new Series 2 Tivo DVR for 2 damn weeks, then you have to go announcing version 3.
The DealDatabase guys will get one of these, and they'll see if (actually to what extent) it can be hacked to turn off the DRM and enable file extraction/networking. Then we'll know. Don't buy one until then, if those things are important to you...
The subscription data compared to your Cox DVR is heads and tails above it. I suppose some people might not care for all the extra details that Tivo provides in their guide data, but this is the major selling point for me from Tivo. I have paid well over double the lifetime fee it would have cost me on both my Tivos, but I keep the subscriptions going simply because I appreciate their guide data being so well done. And i'll keep doing such in the future.
Relax. It was only one moderator, and as you can now see, someone usually comes along and moderates things back up.
Just repeating the post verbatim dosen't help the moderation process.
I thought Tivo2Go was cool until I found this source forge project Galleon. It can do everything the Tivo2Go program can do and more. Which means it can transfer video to your PC, play mp3s, view photos from your PC!
One of the key features it has is the ability to put shows BACK on your Tivo. But that feature doesn't impress my friends as much as the email viewer, the movie listings, and the weather forecasts. I realize that MythTV has some of these features, but this improves the fun you can have with Tivo.
I am sure the slashdot crew could find even more interesting uses for this application (RSS feeds). And since the application supports plugins you can write you own Tivo apps.
I also appreciate that Tivo ALLOWS this kind of things on their box. They could be all "closed source" and shut programs like this down. They hold Tivo Developer Challenges to find more useful ways to use the Tivo. They know when people have hacked their Tivo and added a larger hard drive but choose not to shut them down.
I can't stress it enough. If you have Tivo, and you have a computer take a look at Galleon.
"Tempt not a desperate man" - Willy S.
Two questions:
(1) Does it still require a landline telephone connection? I have a cable modem for Net access, useful for remote programming, but like many others have dropped the (otherwise) unnecessary landline.
(2) Does it offer, either plainly or through a simple hack, the 30-second commercial skip? The DVR from my cable company allows dual recording while I'm watching another recording, so foregoing the 30-second commercial skip seemed a small cost.
But if the Series 3 drops the landline requirement and offers the commercial skip, as well as records two programs as noted in the posting, it might make sense to get when I upgrade to HDTV.
No, you can watch them with WMP, but you supposedly need Sonic MyDVD to burn them . As someone else pointed out, you can use freely available utilities to "unwrap" the .tivo files into straight mpeg that you can then do with as you please.
e goryID=85>
n tainero ntainer&Container=%2FNowPlaying
Maybe you are thinking of TiVo Desktop -- the app they provide to let you download the shows from your TiVo? You don't even really need this (though it is nice), you can download through your browser if you find out the url.
<i><url:http://bryan.daneman.org/default.aspx?cat
TiVoToGo Webserver Url's
Here are some of the known Url's for accessing content on your TiVo. (This only applies to TiVo's with the TiVoToGo update.):
https://<TIVO-IP-ADDR>/nowplaying/index.html (username:tivo password:<your media access key>)
http://<TIVO-IP-ADDR>/TiVoConnect?Command=QueryCo
https://<TIVO-IP-ADDR>/TiVoConnect?Command=QueryC
</i>
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
t's nice that it has Ethernet, but can you do anything useful with it or will it be heavily DRM'ed?
With current S2 TiVos you can do quite a bit with the ethernet -- play MP3s, slideshows, get weather/traffic/movie times and tickets/etc (the interface is open and extensible), transfer recordings to a PC and back (PC includes Windows, Mac, and Linux; although for the latter two you probably need to run Galleon), transfer MPEG2 video to the TiVo (and maybe MPEG4/H.264 w/ the Series3? It's not clear yet), and various other stuff.
As far as the video that's exported goes -- it's in a ".tivo" format which is a loosely containered MPEG2 video. It's completely trivial to strip off the outer layer and get to the real data beneath it. And it looks like the new TiVo Desktop software will even offer transcoding to a number of alternate (DRM'd) formats as well. But really, it's a joke to take off the TiVo DRM, or to just play it from a standard MPEG2 capable video player (it's designed to allow you to do that). Yes, you can play it in mplayer.
What about the data on the USB disk--is it encrypted or is it readable and usable MPEG files?
It's SATA, not USB, but that's a minor nit. The data is not in straight MPEG files -- it's on TiVo's proprietary FS. That was figured out long ago. But if you can simply download the stream to your PC, there's little reason to futz around with the drive -- especially since you cannot be assured that the entire video is stored on the external drive (it may be, but it may also cross drives; the article states this).
The thing I love about my homebrew system is itcan be upgraded with a new HD PVR card when HD finaly get to the UK there is also the added advantage that it is very easy to add another drive to increase the storage plus i can listen to internet Radio and watch Movies in glorious 7.1 THX certified sound with no monthly fee!
I would of expected only the lazyiest slashdotter to have not built their own PVR!
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
My dream setup: two CableCARDs into a Series 3 Tivo, and one simple non-DVR box from Time Warner. That way I can keep my OnDemand stuff and I can record two channels at the same time on Tivo. I wonder, though, how much I will pay TWC for triplicating the service for me. The CableCARDs are $1.75/piece/month (here in NYC).
This thread proves once again that Slashdot needs a (-1, Cheapskate that won't ever buy anything their mommies don't give them the money for, but will whine endlessly for it to be free anyway) rating.
Ahem. I bought a Series 1 TiVo box in June 2000, later upgraded it myself to 200GB (the absolute most space available at the time), and happily bought a lifetime subscription. (The sort of idiots here who whine and complain about the horrible, awful TiVo subscription fee has always been around and always will; please ignore them.) However, five years later my box sits in the closet. In part it's because a drive died, but it's mostly because, yes, I built a MythTV box.
I *didn't* built a MythTV box because of:
* The subscription fee. See above. I always felt I got way more than my money's worth from TiVo; heck, were I to sell my box on eBay it'd still be worth a few hundred dollars due to the lifetime subscription.
* A desire to export TiVo recordings to elsewhere. I never quite understood the fascination people had and have with decrypting TiVo's file system and exporting programs to elsewhere. If anything I wanted my TiVo to act as the portal through which I could view my video library.
I built a MythTV box because I wanted to:
* Bring programs *into* the box, not out of it. MythTV lets me view all my videos and DVD images in a nice, neat, format that resembles the directory hierarchy they are stored in.
* Record HDTV programs. Thanks to two cable boxes and two FireWire cables, I can today record two HD programs simultaneously.
* Have plenty of storage space. MPEG-2 HD programs take 7GB/hour. about 10 times more than TiVo's about 700MB/GB on the lowest-quality standard. With MythTV I can use NFS (or, in my case due to mysterious performance issues, Samba) to put all the recordings I want on my 2.8TB RAID 5 array. From the description it sounds like the Series 3 TiVo will have an Ethernet jack, but a) it's likely to be 100Mbps--likely to be problematic in real-life conditions when recording two HD programs and watching a third at the same time--and b) who knows what type of external storage the box will ever support in practice.
That's it. No, I really don't care about MythTV's themability (Why, oh why, do people focus on themes in free software so much? Don't they realize that 99% of them look eye-meltingly awful--Kids, raytracing is, like, *so* 1995--and don't do a thing to fix any underlying usability issues with the application?), MythWeather, MythGame, MythPhone, etc., etc. Hey, they're nice, but I'd give them up in a flash to fix the last niggling bugs in mythfrontend (Geez, folks, what *is* up with the "displaying OSD in some recordings consistently crashes mythfrontend" bug in 0.18.1? Linus used to call such issues "brown bag" bugs, as in bugs in Linux kernel releases so showstoppingly bad he wanted to wear a brown bag for letting it loose into the world.) and the annoyances (some pretty colossal) in MythVideo's Video Manager module. If TiVo Series 3 manages to robustly support external filesystems (I have *no* problems with some sort of encryption scheme here) *and* let me view my preexisting videos through the elegant TiVo interface, I'm there. (Especially if TiVo kindly offers us longtime lifetime-subscription owners free upgrades.) I am, however, not waiting for these things to occur; there's TV to watch, and record, today.
I didn't know that about the S2's. Thanks. External adapters are silly - who wants a set-top box with things hanging off it?
Fitting the card is hardly difficult. You'll spend more time finding the right screw driver to remove the three (four?) screws on the back, and then trying to figure out how to make the top cover slide back without damaging it. Oh, I guess you have to widen a hole at the back to make enough room for the RJ45 to slip through. This is half-an-hour work... the OP was suggesting building a MythTV box - that sounds far more time consuming.
I can't say I miss any of the features of newer Tivo software revisions. Then again, I'm in Canada and so have to run a Tivo service emulator anyway.
I would have to agree on the statement that mythtv requires way too much tweaking...
It isn't like I am not an experienced Linux user... I have been extensively using Linux at home, then work since 1992, kernel 0.98. I use it everyday, work, home.
I do have a mythtv box, and timewarner cable HD. It is a pain. I gave up on my mythtv box, was wasting too much time on it and ended up getting the timewarner HDPVR which works okay for what it is supposed to do: recording shows. I am not a big fan of it, lacks mythtv functionnalities but hey, it records and I can play my shows.
Why do I think mythtv is a pain?
configuring it and having it to work is a major hassle. Between the special drivers for the infrared receiver/remote, the lircc, the kernel drivers, making sure the tv card works (PVR350), getting the sound in, especially I have HD, I WANT to record in HD, and AC3 sound. Well, I only got Svideo. Quality sucks. Oh, and the major pain is to be able to change channel, as it uses my only HD tuner in the place, it has to change channel via IR (which doesn't work still), and it forces me to watch what is being recorded. I live in NYC and I have no interest in recorded over the air shows and would rather be able to record anything that is playing on my HD set.
So if someone could sell me a pre-installed mythtv ready for HDTV, with HDTV tuner integrated that I can then tweak and customize, I would take it and pay for it! I love the functionnalities of Mythtv, but for what I want. It is just not ready yet.
believe me. I LOVE mythtv. I just wish I could use it as easily as the PVR I have.
I have had a ReplayTV (2nd Gen) for a couple of years now (purchased during the 'Green Sticker' fiasco, look it up). They say the Tivo's are easier to use, but I honestly can't see how much easier a GUI needs to be. Also, opinions (at the time, at least) were that the ReplayTV had a better picture. And it had Ethernet built in (which I can't use since my den isn't wired, but thats my problem).
:).
Also, Tivo from what I read, is hurting financally. ReplayTV got acquired by Denon's parent company, and therefore has better backing to make it through tough times, plus maybe just better management in general.
I want my ReplayTV HD so I can take the HD plunge (I really enjoy my buddies 56" Samsung DLP
-- Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
Enjoy your DirecTiVo for now, because when DirecTV goes to MPEG-4 you'll be out of luck and you will have to come crawling in my skin back to a company that supports CableCARD to get your precious TiVo.
How much did you pay for your mythtv box? How much time did you put into setting it up? How much time do you put into maintaining it? Can non-geeks use it successfully? How loud is it in the living room? Does it look good in the stereo cabinet?
Tivo is the iPod of PVRs. It just works and does it so well.
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
Maybe if they started shipping these units today they would have a chance at saving themselves. But they're not going to have them ready for another 6 months at least?
They announced HDTV support for early 2006 at last years CES, and that was insanity. How can it take one year, much less two, to develop HD TiVo when the capability is (was) already available through DirecTV. By the time this box ships, the DVR market is already going to be firmly in the hands of the cable companies. Most of the market is going to accept a lesser box for $5.95 a month rather than wait around for the privilege of owning an HD TiVo for $12.95 a month. And thats assuming you believe the TiVo will actually be available this year. Last time we heard from TiVo (they haven't said a word about HD for a year), the HD box was supposed to be available *now*.
I bought TiVo when they first came out, and I've given half a dozen as gifts. At this point I won't waste another dime on them.
My 2006 prediction, TiVo will be bought at an extreme discount by a CATV company, the technology cherry picked for their own products and the TiVo name taken, but otherwise the TiVo will be gone.
>I'm not quite sure what your point is.
;-)
The Series 2 I just bought has USB only, no ethernet. I had the same WTF reaction when I went to hook it up. Only thing I can think is it provides some flexibility for wireless vs wired?
I just went and googled for a minute or two and settled on a Netgear FA120 10/100 USB 2.0 Adapter. Plugged it in and TiVo found it right away -- couple screens later and I had configured it with a static IP and was ready to go.
I've got (probably) the same Sony S1 -- I got it second-hand because the modem was bad and the guy had already opened the case to add a second drive and couldn't return it. Had to fiddle with PPP over serial to get it activated, though. Best $30 I ever spent!
>why does everybody feel the need to list the TV programmes they like to record
I don't know -- maybe because they feel it reveals something about their personality they want others to know? What's the big deal?
I like MythBusters too!
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
True... Did I hear that directv's contract with tivo ends in 07? If so and they go with their own dvr that sucks as much as the typical cable co. one does then they'll lose every tivo customer they have.
Actually the main draw of the whole set up is the feature that is in the series3. Dual tuners. So if directv wants to keep my business then they'll need to keep tivo. If they don't, i'm gone.
External adapters are silly - who wants a set-top box with things hanging off it?
They are silly, but it's not all that bad -- it's just yet another cable really. But it's an added expense (Fitting the card is hardly difficult.
I remember it being a major pain on my two Philips units -- it wasn't a case of the card being too large or anything, but rather the amount of space available to work in being exceptionally small. And yeah, getting the case off wasn't all that smooth, and making the hole for the ethernet cable (especially if it already had an RJ45 connector on it) was annoying.
The case screws were standard 1/4" hex-head/#2 Philips; maybe Sony used Torx.
I can't say I miss any of the features of newer Tivo software revisions.
Folders are nice. The networking features are a god-send -- we constantly transfer shows between TiVos. The video extraction on the S1 was incredibly painful back when I was trying to use it. But I took advantage of TiVo's offer to transfer lifetime memberships to S2 boxes at one point (wonder if they'll offer that again on the S3s... that would be nice) and sold my S1's on eBay. Came out pretty close to even.
It's nice that it has Ethernet, but can you do anything useful with it or will it be heavily DRM'ed?
Yep - not ever have to worry about running a phone line over to the TiVo, or think about when the phone is tied up, or get incensed at the stupidity of transferring data over POTS ever again.
Even if you couldn't transfer video with it (and I'm sure you'll be able to) the update capabilities make it worth it.
However the problem comes with a PVR, you either get Tivo and do some jiggery pokery to get it to manage the changing of the channels on the digibox - which is not only a huge hack but means you can only tape one channel at a time and can't change from it during recording.
Or you pick up a box from Digifusion, Humax or two other companies I've forgotten which has twin tuners and a huge hard-drive but has a UI which isn't quite so slick. Oh, and not forgetting that absolutely none of them have season pass/series link so you cannot just push a button and record the entire series. They're nice ... but they just don't quite cut it.
Tivo could make a killing if they came up with a twin-tuner freeview box.
(side note: I know that part of the reason on no season pass is because freeview doesn't broadcast the season and episode numbers in its scheduling. However it doesn't take a genius to come up with a simple algorithm that looks for a similar title at around the same time each day and records it if it is on. Not the best solution - but better than having no one-click season pass at all)
[grumble]
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Incidentally - why does everybody feel the need to list the TV programmes they like to record? It's like music stories - with those people always seem to like to post the "artists" they like. Why? It's a waste of space.
/. praising it that I thought I would give it a try and loved it.
Sometimes to get grass root efforts going to support the shows/music they like. I never saw "Firefly" when it first came out, but I saw enough people on
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
With the way memory is going up in size and down in price, everything will be automatically recorded you will be able to just delete the shows you don't like instead of spending time finding/recording the ones you do.
Either that or TV will soon become fully 'on demand' and Tivo will become just another alternative for individual viewing preferences.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Does anyone know if DirecTV offers or has any plans to offer CableCards? If so, then I'll be all over this series 3 TiVo when I move next year.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Oh please say so... WEP is so hard for users to configure (long key), and most want to run their AP in WPA mode for more security.
Secret: Strong enough for a man, but made for /.
But what the hell do I know? I use Mitchum (unscented).
> I bought the ethernet card and plugged it in. No problems.
I have the same setup, but enough of the "no problems" already. For your average non-techie consumer wanting Ethernet there ARE problems galore with the SA1: willingness to void warranty by opening the unit, obtaining the right size Torx screw driver (which not exactly a common household item like a Philips driver), cutting the right-sized hole into the back of the unit to snap in an RJ45 socket and obtaining said socket and wiring it to a patch cable stub (or just drilling a hole into the back and running a patch cable straight from the card to the outside and having it all look like shite and be prone to having the cable pulled too hard and unplugged or unseating the card), obtaining and installing the necessary Linux software to serve up shows from the box, editing the init script to start it all up, and hoping that after all this the box still works right.
Yeah, no problems at all for your average Best Buy customer.
I'm not sure how your Cox works but mine charges $9.95/month for the box and $4.95/month for the service.
Not necessarily that I want to be swimming in media, but that I want to watch what I want to watch, when I want to watch it.
I haven't seen a commercial in about a year (thank you 30 second skip), and I just tell TiVo what shows I like, and when I visit it, they're on there. Who knows when the shows play; I don't care.
I watch more shows now than I used to, but spend a lot less time doing it. Win-win, I say.
As to whether I'd let my children spend hours a day getting a media addition in front of a TV: No, and parenting skills haven't really changed since the advent of TV. Bad parents will still be bad parents.
Tivo are fine, if you're willing to put up with the cost and limitations. MythTV are more functional, but require quite a bit of tweaking and are not as user friendly. Just keep in mind, there are other options. Windows Media Center, ReplayTV, Elgato, etc. are middle ground choices worth considering. My PVR took an hour to get up and running properly, but I haven't really touched it since. It is intuitive enough that my girlfriend figured it out in an hour, cheaper than the Tivo, and has a lot of functionality missing from the Tivo. It also has no DRM implemented.
In my opinion, Tivo was great, then they sold out. It is time to look to the newer players on the field and see what they will offer.
Notice that the back output is labeled HDMI and not HDCP. Could this mean that they haven't signed onto the DRM contract required by HDCP?
I wonder if they will do so prior to shipping.
It is about time we get HD in a PVR!
I'd assume it would pump out the transcoded files via the ethernet port (wow, takes so much brainpower to figure this out).
Snide remarks, unfounded conclusions, incorrect statements--you continue to live up to your low reputation.
As an avid TV user I see nothing in TiVo that would mean anything to me personally. I have an HD-DVR from Brighthouse and the only issue is that i'd love to record more than 2 shows at once while watching another channel. This is not possible, you can record 2 channels at the same time, but if you want to watch Tv at the same time, it has to be one of the channels you are recording or a previous recording. Not good enough!
And I think I'm like 99% of all TV viewers, I couldn't care less if I can not attach to a network at home or can not copy the shows to CD/DVD or similar. The movies I want to keep, I prefer to buy a DVD rather than copy the content from a DVR. In most cases, I delete a show as soon as I have watched it. Network? PC? Record to CD/DVD? Couldn't care less. 7.1 ability? Now we're talking important stuff.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
I guess us satellite users can just sit on a tack. There are no S-Video or even composite imputs on this box nor is there serial control or IR blaster support.
Not that being a satellite user (Dish Network) I could use the dual tuner features (would need two satellite recievers) or of coruse the CableCARD but it would be nice to buy a Series3 because it would be more future proof, like maybe if Dish miraculously became CableCARD compible in a few years) or I switched to a different provider (less likely)
One of the things I REALLY love about my Stand Alone Series2 is that it's provider independent, and that it works with satellite, analog or digital cable, whatever I've got.
Elaborate please, oh wise AC. Which incorrect statements? If you'd look into how they're currently handling PSP and iPod transcoding, they're not DRM'd, but they are digitally watermarked. So, as I said, please elaborate.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
I'd LOVE to have a MythTV PVR, even if it's a pain in the ass to configure- having automatic commercial removal rocks, no ads in the program guide rocks, being able to do whatever the hell I want with the video I record rocks, but there's one thing that's holding me back- I want more HDTV content than merely what is available over the air. Until they make a card that I can put in my computer that accepts a CableCard, I'm pretty much up a creek when it comes to getting HD content from digital cable with MythTV. That means no Discovery HD theater, no ESPNHD, no InHD, no HDnet, etc, etc.
This TiVo sounds like the best solution to date- at least I'll probably be able to get the content onto my computer (although it'll likely be a little more complicated than drag-n-drop)- unlike the Scientific Atlanta HD DVR Time Warner gives us. The downside being that their interface, and the recorded programs, will likely be littered with ads, as well as any subscription fees they may charge.
Anyone know of any PCI cards with CableCard slots in them in the works? or is that something the content/cable companies have ensured will never happen?
I own a duel tuner DirecTivo and I've been very happy with it. My only complaint is that generally the DirecTivo lags behind the regular TiVo in terms of updates, etc. A good example of this is that my DirecTivo has USB ports on the back but no support for a USB ethernet card.
Looking at this there's a couple of things I wish this thing had.
1. A firewire port. I understand why they wouldn't put one in there, but come on. My parents digital TV tuner has a firewire port, this thing should to.
2. A gigE network port. It's 2006... put a real network adapter in this thing.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
so what if tivo had HDTV DVR, time warner cable had been pimpin their HDTV DVR for almost 4 or 5 months now
OK, I admit, I'm a little behind the times on this whole Tivo thing. (Yeah, I have a B.S. in Computer Science and my VCR still flashes 12:00, too :) )
So someone fill me in. Isn't this just a digital VCR that you have to pay a subscription fee to use, with the axe of immenent DRM hanging over your necks?
I'm missing the appeal. Why do I have to pay a subscription to use a recording device and deal with "broadcast flags"?
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Yes, Torx screws.
;)
Whilst I was at it, I added bash, Tivoweb (HTTP service), mfs_ftp, etc. No problems transferring things around for me either
GigE wouldn't do you any good with the processor in that box. It wouldn't be able to manage the data as fast as the network could get the data to it.
You do know that you can subscribe to TiVo in Canada, don't you? I'm running an S2 with a legit subscription - they started supporting Canadian customers back in the fall. You may want to look into this, if only because the people who are maintaining Simplicity probably won't be doing so for long since their intention was not to rip off TiVo, and one day you may be out in the cold. Not to mention that it's the right thing to do. :-)
Tivo can not compete, they are as good as dead.
Hasn't there been a story on Slashdot every 4 months for the past 3 years or so regarding tivo going out of business?
What about for your average /.er who is willing to install MythTV? That describes the OP.
I'm quite relaxed, and as you might have noticed, I used the singular form. The only reason I jumped in was that I was already planning to ask the same questions. In my experience here, repeating the question does sometimes help the process, especially when the original post is in danger of falling below the noise floor.
Although tivo is notorious for their slow rollouts. I'm pretty sure they "announced" Tivo2Go at the 1999 CES (I kid, I kid)
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
How can even be considered truely HD if it doesn't have a DVI connection? My HDTV has one as well as my HD sat receiver. Isn't that kind of required?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Oh, you're such a slack motherfucker. : p
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Does anyone know why cable companies don't support On Demand over anything but their own boxes? Is it a technical reason or are they just being anti-competitive?
This box would be perfect if OD worked (wife likes OD), perhaps I'll just get the normal non DVR cable box and connect that too...
Never had a tivo, I refuse to pay the outrageous monthly fee.
:-)
As a TiVo owner I have to take issue with this comment. (I know. What a surprise...
The lifetime subscription fee for a TiVo is $300. How much configuration time did your Myth box take? I think it would be safe to say that over the lifetime of your Myth box you'll invest well over 16 hours of your time configuring it. $300 / 16 hours means that your time is worth less than $19 per hour.
The bottom line is that you *currently* cannot build a MythTV box that can compete with a TiVo + lifetime subscription unless you consider your time spent building and configuring it to be "free".
Now, maybe you enjoy building a Myth box and maybe you do value your time doing so at zero dollars per hour. Lord knows I could have bought a Media Center PC a long time ago with all the hours I've spent dicking around with XBMP/XBMC, but most people can't and won't want to do that. Hell, I still have to go to family members' houses to hook up their DVD players. I can't imagine telling my mother to "just build yourself a MythTV box, Mom."
My point is that maybe TiVo's subscription fee isn't quite so outrageous after all.
If I don't have a need for digital cable, it would only cost me about $12.95 per month according to the Tivo site, and I would save $20 per month not getting the digital add-on to the normal cable (which usually has everything I really would want to watch anyway).
Sure, MythTV and/or Freevo might seem cheaper, but my time is valuable as well. I need to factor in the amount of time I will have to deal with getting them set up in a way that my Wife, and any babysitters would be able to use them without any issues. This is already a done deal with a Tivo.
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I don't think S1 Tivos are supported, or at least not without hacking. I knew Simplicity would go away when Tivo offer service here, and I've been following the discussion on forums.tivocanada.com. I guess at some point I will have to decide whether I really want to shell out another $15/month for TV, or whether I'm happy to use the TV Guide from my Globe and Mail subscription and use the Tivo as a digital VCR.
The Series 3 unit doesn't need or support external tuner boxes. It *is* the cable box now. Two cablecard, two ATSC, and two NTSC tuners cover everything from unencrypted OTA SDTV to encrypted cable ATSC. No more latency since *it* will be changing the channel.
it's all about the cable card here, being able to record digital cable right off the wire and such.
The FCC was told they cannot mandate the flag. This does not mean that the entertainment industry did not choose to implement it. Tivo was all but forced to include it because of industry pressure as do most manufactures to avoid law suits and dropped support. Without the FCC rule though, devices can be made that ignore it legally so they could possible choose not to acknowledge the flag later though that is doubtful. As a side note, ATI has built in support for it too.
Yeah, I'm fanboy like when it comes to tivo (still have and USE my 1st gen 14hr model, albeit with a bigger drive)... BUT... Lifetime service + cost of (current series 2) box is going to be less expensive then any myth system you can build from scratch. I die just a little bit inside every time someone uses the I'm not going to pay for monthly service when I can get this stuff for free with myth argument. yo Because you need to qualify that, you really do, the TCO of a myth box, is likely to be HIGHER then the TCO of a series 2 with lifetime. Further, the resale value of a tivo with lifetime is very high. Trying selling your myth box 3 years later and see if you can recover virtualy full price! Listen, sure Myth is super cool, you can put a gazillion tuners in, you can do HD (OTA only) and the community doing development and support is fantastic, I get all that. You can also expand at will, add new things as they come to be and "change with the times" Tivo's will support that to a *limited* degree, but clearly this is where the Myth is the winner, it's a system you build and control. But you can plug a tivo in and it just works for you, your wife, your kid, and maybe even your mother in law... Don't try THAT with Myth. Plus, you know a lot of people just want their PVR/DVR to record the stuff that they want to watch, and tivo does that EXTREMELY well. (Do you factor the cost of your TIME messing with a Myth box too? Or is that actually a benefit because it's *fun*?) So, make your ubergeek Myth Rocks Tivo Sucks arguments, you will have some valid points, but Total Cost of Ownership is not the argument to make, because tivo wins there.
I used to think the same thing, and then in 2000 I won a free 14-hour unit in some online contest back in the crazy days of the web. I didn't even have cable, and it was still the greatest thing since sliced bread.
seen
I still haven't found the right way to explain it to somebody who (like me in 2000) doesn't get it. I think the difficulty of explaining the box is hurting their sales, too.
Suffice it to say it's more reliable than a VCR, 100x easier to program and use, and it's the only piece of my home theatre that my fiancee doesn't think was designed by antisocial engineers specifically to torture her.
I worry about the DRM a bit, but so far, I've never run into it. I understand the flap we saw earlier this year was over a bug-- only PPV shows are supposed to disappear. Because, you know, you have to pay... per... view.
The subscription service is for a few things.
Tivo Menus for show times.
Tivo upgraded to software, like being able to sit at work and schedule your recordings at home. Whoopity DOOO.
I use the DirectTV TiVO package, at $4.95/Month. I don't get some of the cool features, but it's $8 less/month than TiVo Subscription.
So let's address your concerns, as a non-subscriber and someone who has never owned a Tivo box, right??
.tivo format files for MPEG transfer.
> 1. You still have a subscription fee (not a concern for some / major >concern for others)
Gosh...you mean you have to actually PAY for a service? Cable is free after all. So is internet access and phone service too for that matter.
I know there are free options out there (Myth etc) but Tivo doesn't exactly hide the fact from users that in order to use their product you need to buy the service. As a bonus, I found in the past that the updated schedules Tivo gets are more often even more correct than the program guide on my digital cable receiver.
> 2. You still have Tivo the company in the mix, which in the past has:
> * Erased user-recorded content
I had Tivo service for 4 years and never once had a problem with this. Maybe there have been a few fluke situations where this happens, but every deletion I ever saw on my box followed the rules I set up when recording the program (Delete after X days, when I run out of space, options like that)
> * Recorded programs that Tivo wanted you to see, without >asking your permission (which in addition to being very annoying, also >used your precious disk space)
There's a simple little option to turn off the suggestions, even my parents could figure out how to turn this feature off on their own. And for what it's worth, the software is designed such that any suggested programs are the first programs deleted when disk space starts to become an issue. So unless having empty drive space sitting there unused makes you feel better this isn't really a problem. If it is, then turn off suggestions.
> * Limited the duration you have for watching recorded content
I can't really argue with this other than mentioning that the only shows I'm aware of this actually coming up on after the initial bugs are PPV shows and other content that if you REALLY want to keep it, you could find another way to record. See the other threads about stripping the DRM off of the
> * Not guaranteed any of Tivos features - They can remove them >as they see fit (conversely, they can also add features, but who's going >to complain about that?)
Again, not going to argue with you about the loss of features, but I don't really recall anything like that having happened. And like you said, you certainly don't complain when they give you bonus features you never thought you'd see like file transfer and network connectivity.
> * Made very questionable deals about subscriber privacy >(selling demographical information, regional data, etc)
Every user of Tivo agrees to have non-identifiable information shared when they sign up for the service. There's no privacy issue here as it's specifically mentioned that there is no tie between the information shared and the specific machine it comes from. Put your tinfoil hat back on.
> 3. And this Tivo box, as with all other Tivo models, is still limited >in what it can do, NOT in terms of hardware and potential, but in what >Tivo will let you do with the hardware you're purchasing.
I'm sorry, but if you compare Tivo to any other commercial DVR out there, it's the most hacker friendly unit out there. While they may shake their fingers and warn that you will void your warranty, it's not like they're Microsoft barring you from XBox Live as soon as they see a modified system connecting to their network.
All this from someone who dumped their Tivo for the Comcast DVR because I wanted HD recording. If/when the series 3 hits the shelves I may just be one of the first in line to get my quality service back.
Also, as a sports fan, I still go to bars to watch Football (or to the stadium), but I still record the game so I can watch it later in the week to dissect the plays and performance of my team. Of course, I might just be a little too obessessed..
Commercial Skip (also known as Commercial Advance) is a feature that automatically detects commercials and skips over the entire commercial break without user intervention. This has been on some VCRs for years and used to be availible on ReplayTVs (till the got sued and had to remove it).
Incidentally - why does everybody feel the need to list the TV programmes they like to record?
:)
Information wants to be free! What's wrong with sharing?
> transfer MPEG2 video to the TiVo
Really? I've never seen an option for that that didn't involve major hacking.
Though, I'm very interested. How is it done?
Though, I'm very interested. How is it done?
Put the MPEG2 file in a directory. Point your desktop software (TiVo Desktop, Galleon, or whatever) to the directory. Go to the TiVo and select it just as you would another TiVo and transfer it. In the case of Galleon you don't even need to go to the TiVo -- you can tell Galleon to initiate the transfer to the TiVo.
HMO is a wonderful thing.
This is only applicable to S2 or higher standard TiVos -- HMO is not available on S1 TiVos or DirecTiVos.
If we cannot extract recorded programs off the unit, it's worthless.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Um, you're talking about the Series 1. The Series 2 require you to plug in a USB ethernet adapter and ... that's it. Like he said, just plug it in.
Nosce te Ipsum
Too bad it doesn't work with DishNetwork as transparently. I hate cable companies, and I'm not giving them any more of my money.
Comment of the year
"grass root efforts"? Somehow I don't think American Idol needs any more exposure.
Sigs are just way too much work
Any word if Tivo will EVER come to Canada? I'm itching to get either a DVD Recorder or something similar.... but I want a TIVO!
Thanks for the useful information. Just one more question:
It's SATA, not USB, but that's a minor nit.
I was thinking of plugging in an external USB disk. Are you saying the Tivo doesn't work with external USB disks?
The only reason you don't see TiVo offering you anything interesting is because you havn't used TiVo. Heck, even TiVo's "speculative recording" is enough to get me addicted. I can't say how many times I want to watch some TV, but nothing good is on (or it's not a show-start time), and TiVo just happened to record something that was on last night when I was doing something else.
Also, I think some of the BrightHouse DVRs (not all, thankfully), can't properly "record all episodes of this show, but do not record reruns". (something TiVo calls "Season Pass", and has done correctly from day 1)
TiVo also has other value-added features I may not use as much, given the channels I watch. For example, during some commercials and/or show promos, it'll show an indicator where you can press a remote button to schedule a recording of that show, or get an additional preview/info segment.
Additionally, TiVo is always expanding their Internet-based add-ons which even include internet radio and some Yahoo! account hooks on the latest revisions.
As I recently got a trial BrightHouse DVR when I switched my cable service from Adelphia, I had to make the choice again myself. In the end, I could sum up my opinion in the following sentence:
"The BrightHouse DVR may have better hardware than the TiVo, but the TiVo has MUCH BETTER software".
With this new Series3 box, it looks like the hardware will now be fixed as well.
> Um, you're talking about the Series 1.
Um, so is he.
Are you saying the Tivo doesn't work with external USB disks?
It does not, and I do not know of anyone who has hacked a TiVo to use one. I'm not up on the latest hacks, so maybe someone over at dealdatabase has done it.
Do you still need a landline to use the subscription. I have always wanted tivo, but do not want to get a landline. Cell phones and skype are what we use here. Thats the one thing thats kept me back from purchasing a tivo.
cutting the right-sized hole into the back of the unit to snap in an RJ45 socket... (or just drilling a hole into the back and running a patch cable straight from the card to the outside...)
I just bent up one of the tabs on the lid in the back and put a small patch cable to an RJ45 gender changer. No diking necessary, and no more hanging out than a USB adapter. And once expanded, there's not much need to move the unit.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Does Tivo work with NTL? Not sure how cable standards differ...
Ok, I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but:
You still have Tivo the company in the mix, which in the past has:
Erased user-recorded content
Yup, due to broadcast flags being set incorrectly by the originating broadcaster. All mistakes have been quickly reported and resolved. Note the fate of ReplayTV, which was sued and sold into oblivion due to their ignoring obvious DRM issues.
Recorded programs that Tivo wanted you to see, without asking your permission (which in addition to being very annoying, also used your precious disk space)
Yup, this can be turned off very easily. Also, a portion of the disk is dedicated to system-level functions, and suggestions are one of those functions. Note that disk space is no longer precious.
Limited the duration you have for watching recorded content
Um, see #1 above. This has not yet happened on a widescale basis.
Not guaranteed any of Tivos features - They can remove them as they see fit (conversely, they can also add features, but who's going to complain about that?)
And who today guarantees any features?
Made very questionable deals about subscriber privacy (selling demographical information, regional data, etc)
Sigh. Subscriber data is aggregated and sold. Read here for more information. http://www.tivo.com/5.11.3.asp
And this Tivo box, as with all other Tivo models, is still limited in what it can do, NOT in terms of hardware and potential, but in what Tivo will let you do with the hardware you're purchasing.
This is a general use consumer device. If you want full control and customization, roll your own.
I've seen instructions on how to use USB disks with hacked TiVos. It's simply a matter of loading the Linux USB mass storage driver and mounting the properly formatted disk.
I call shenanigans.. I still see the red flag from time to time, always from the local fox affiliate (Fox 25 Boston) via Comcast cable in Woburn, MA. Almost always on Futurama, the Simpsons, and Family Guy.
Our is connected via a USB 802.11b adapter quite happily.
Secret, Strong enough for a man... and that's good enough for me...
The Code Ninja is swift with his tool, precise in his delivery, and deadly accurate in his execution.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Someone told me that Tivo was making software for the Motorola DVR. When I read this posting, it sounded exactly like my Motorola DVR.
You used to be able to order a TiVo demo DVD that you could give away to people so they could see (on their TV DVD players) how TiVo worked -- no need to explain, just say "watch this".
... sigh ...
I gave mine to my parents. I got it back with a "We couldn't figure it out" comment. And my dad's a tenured Ph.D. at a major university (you'd have heard of it)
i am a soviet space shuttle
I can't believe I'm still needing to say this to people years later, but here goes...
The reason for your TiVo subscription and the reason why TiVo is so great boils down to ONE feature, called "Season Pass". You select or punch in the name of a show. After that, *every* episode ( with the option of not recording repeats ) is recorded- with nothing more for you to do except watch.
Sure, you could program your VCR to come on at some given time, and make sure you have a blank tape in the machine, and do so repeatedly, but do you? Would you? How much of a pain in the ass would it be? Would it be worth $14/mo for someone to do that for you, for all of your favorite shows? As an added benefit, if you happen to just sit down and watch whatever is on, you can decide to hit pause, go do whatever, come back a few minutes later, start watching where you left off, then skip the next batch of commercials...
but it's really all about the machine knowing the programming schedule and getting you the shows you want, even if their aired at some unusual time, without you ever knowing what time it is. I'm watching "Everybody hates Chris", "Scrubs", "My Name is Earl", and really, I'm not even sure what *channel* or *day* they're on, much less what time, but it doesn't matter. I sit down, look at my list of recorded shows, *all* of which interest me, and pick one I want to watch.
There's also a similar "Wish list" feature where you punch in a keyword ( or name ) and every show with that in the description is recorded, as well as a 'suggestion' feature where shows 'like' the ones you record are also recorded. I don't use those, because I don't have time to watch even the shows I Season Pass, but with a big enough hard drive ( and enough viewing time ) it might be neat.
Oh, and so far, broadcast flags don't exist. Reported problems with commercials not being skippable and programs disappearing early have been *extremely* limited in scope, and the backlash has already been big enough that TiVo seems to have backed off on these areas completely. They'll take my TiVo from my cold, dead hands... I'd be willing to accept some sort of superior replacement, but I haven't seen or heard of one yet.
For me what makes TiVo way more than "just a digital VCR" is the prioritizable season pass system. First of all, just the fact that you can, with one press of a remote button, tell it to get every episode of a show. I have no idea what time any particular show is on anymore. I don't need to care. The TiVo knows, and records it for me. If it were "just a digital VCR" you'd need to know the show's schedule, and program it into the box. And what happens if the show moves to a different time, or they show two episodes back to back one week? You'd miss it if we were talking about a VCR-like device. The TiVo knows what changed, and automatically records at the new/extra times. And I don't even have to pay attention to the show's schedule to make that happen.
It also is smart enough to know which episodes are first-run, and which are reruns. If you want reruns, you can have them. If not, it will skip them.
So it's intelligent about recording a particular show, but it's also intelligent about recording dozens of different shows. You just set them up in a prioritized list, and TiVo takes care of resolving the scheduling conflicts based on the order in which you have prioritized your shows. I love this. I only have to decide which shows I care more about than others, and TiVo will set up the recording schedule based solely on that.
I have nearly 70 season passes (a lot of those are wish lists, or passes for shows that are not on now, but I hope will come back--maybe only 30 of those passes are actively recording shows now), and if I had to manually manage when all those shows were aired, and set up the recording times individually for each, I'd never be able to keep track. That's the value of the TiVo service. I get WAY more stuff recorded for me with the service than I could ever manage to record myself, setting up the times and channels for all the individual recordings.
Do I watch all this? No. That's not the point. Lots of these shows end up being deleted unwatched. The point is to have a big library of shows waiting for me at any given moment, all of which I know I like to watch. Any show I might care to watch is there, waiting for ME, instead of me having to wait for IT.
There have been known hacks to get Canadian guide data into Tivos for a long time. But Tivo's lates series 2 software update added support for Canadian postal codes and guide data, so if you can get one, series 2 Tivos already work in Canada out of the box (well, it may need to download the latest software first). You just have to go elsewhere to get the box.
I've heard unsubstantiated rumors that Tivo will launch in Canada in mid '06.
Must be regional, and if you're still seeing it, they certainly haven't fixed their bug. I've been on a tivo of some sort or another since early 2000, like I said, and have *never* run into the DRM.
Never saw it on comcast, and haven't seen it on DirecTV. It's possible the DTV version of the software doesn't include the DRM stuff at all, although that seems like the sort of thing they would jump to include. They've just been notoriously slow to make software updates to their branch of the Tivo software.
Not guaranteed any of Tivos features - They can remove them as they see fit (conversely, they can also add features, but who's going to complain about that?)
And who today guarantees any features?
Tivo is selling two things, hardware and a service. They have paired the two together, though and you can only do scheduling with both. This means you're stuck with the service even if the requirement for it is to change your hardware's abilities, or if it sucks. Other companies, just sell the hardware and let you pick the service you like best. They have no leverage to remove hardware features, since they don't provide a service they can cut off. This has the added advantage of letting the user pick the right service for them in terms of performance and cost. Right now I know my PVR will never lose the ability to skip ahead 30 seconds or edit out commercials. That is because there is no way for the company that sold me the box to alter the software on it without my approval. If my scheduling provider starts to suck, I'll switch to a different one. Do you see how this offers a lot more of a guarantee?
What do you use for a remote?
My biggest reluctance to moving away from TiVo is it's got the most usefully laid out remote I've ever used for watching video. When I watch a DVD or VHS I miss my TiVo remote terribly. What do people who set up their own box do for a remote----are there IR receiver cards that would let me use my TiVo remote, or am I stuck with something third-party?
I don't know exactly to what the AC was referring, but one thing you seem to have misunderstood was where the transcoding is going to occur. The photos from CES showing the Windows Media/PSP/iPod options are photos of the new Tivo Desktop software. Thus, the Tivo (as it does in the Series 2 boxes) will send the MPEG-2 files as-is from the Tivo to the PC where you can then transcode the files to formats compatible with other devices. They wouldn't offer transcoding within the unit for the simple reason that there wouldn't be enough CPU overhead for this to be time-efficient, especially when encoding two streams and decoding another besides.
No demo, short of having an actual tivo for a few weeks, is going to get it all across. Too much of the functionality that differentiates it from a VCR just doesn't sink in until you've used it for a while *and tried to switch back*.
Anymore, I find I'd rather not watch TV without a DVR. Somebody else will eventually get the little things down as well as Tivo, and a few companies have features I wish Tivo had (automatic commercial skip, the ability to speed up video) but the Tivo package is still my favorite.
Since last year, you've been able to pull shows off the Series 2 Tivos. It's an mpeg2 file with a tivo DRM wrapper, although I understand the wrapper is easy to remove. Even without the hackage, it's pretty stinking easy (and supported!) to download shows and watch them on your laptop or iPod on the airplane or whatever.
I'd be surprised if the Series 3 didn't support TivoToGo, but dumber things have happened.
I have Cox in my area. Currently, I subscribe to basic extended cable. Locals + "normal" cable content (Comedy central, CNN, etc). No premium channels. My bill is exactly $40 a month.
In my area, the Cox PVR is an extra $10/mo to rent the box plus $5/mo. for the "service". If you don't want the PVR, then you pay $10/mo just for the cable box.
While I am not saying you are wrong, I am highly suspicious of your $3.50/mo charge. My bet is that it's a lot more than that and you just haven't noticed.
/.'ers rejoice
I use Mitchum because it's "So effective you could skip a day"
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
And it never will. It's actually not an issue of the DirecTivo "lagging behind", but rather an issue of DirecTV saying "no way". DirecTV wants all access to their boxes locked down TIGHT. They're deathly afraid of hackers. That means not only no Tivo2Go, but not even a network connection. They've only barely tolerated the existence of Tivobecause of customer demand. For years they've been promising/threatening to develop their own DVR platform and dump Tivo-- of course it's taken them until very recently to deploy it, and early reports on it aren't so good, so DirecTivo will be around for a while; but at the same time Tivo's presence on DirecTV receivers is solely at DirecTV's sufferance.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Still, I'd rather buy my own and just pay the $6.50 (plus another $4.95 for Discovery's and ESPN's HD channels). So far Cox isn't allowing this but the rep I talked to indicated they will probably allow it in the future (maybe when they are forced to by legislation?). I figure I could pay up to $700 and the cost would be covered in savings on the monthly fees over about 4 years.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Using the same logic, why do people feel the need to tell everyone (or judge others) about the operating system/computer platform they choose?
First, TiVo *just works*, and it works well for everything it is supposed to do. No tweaking required.
I'm not aware of anything for the user to tweak on the cable DVRs, outside of your own programming preferences, which (because they are *your* preferences) will require tweaking anyway.
Third, other options only record "exactly what you tell them to", and nothing more. While this may seem ok, one gets very easily addicted to TiVo's tendency to also record things it thinks you might want to watch (and sometimes do), but havn't explicitly told it to record.
Here I've found my Cox-supplied DVR does quite well. I can tell it to record only new episodes of "Sunrise Earth", and to capture reruns of "Seinfeld" in a particular time slot on TBS. I can record Gary Calamar's "The Open Road" off of KCRW, since local radio stations come in over digital cable, so that it doesn't keep me up until midnight every Sunday night. I can put in keywords such as "Evolution" and have it record any program whose description contains that word. I can prioritize recordings so that when there is a conflict between three or more programs, it knows which two I would prefer to see and ignores the other(s). That's about as specific as I can possibly be when telling my cable box to "only record exactly what [I] tell [it] to", unless I wanted to go through an entire series episonde by episode and check off certain ones (I don't!).
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
I want two, maybe 3.
I have 2 series 1 boxes with dbl drives, but on the big screen it's a comcast dvr. The tivos almost never miss the beginning or end of shows, but the comcast box doesn't seem to keep time correctly, lags on my commands, and just doesn't give me the happy experience that my tivos do.
Tivo changed my life. I find new products in the store because I don't see their ads. And when some chick exposes her chest on the superbowl, I can rewind to my heart's content.
Why are women so complicated? Find out how little I know here.
S-Video, and composite, and audio is optical digital or RCA stereo. ...AND they'll delete your show whenever they want to.
Screw it. Rhapsody + Netflix + WoW costs far less than any cable.
I used to be the VCR king. Filled all 8(!) slots in my VCR menu. Taped everything I wanted to watch. Had a system for everything. Spent endless amounts of time babysitting the darn thing. Then I got TiVo.
Here are some concrete examples why TiVo is worth its weight in gold:
VCR ERA
TiVo ERA
SUMMARY
Watching all the shows we love, whenever we feel like it, without having to decide whether [going out / answering the phone / going to the bathroom] is more important than whatever we'd otherwise miss, is worth WAY more than the price of admission. I hope you now understand all the ways in which TiVo is better than a VCR.
I had heard that DirecTV had ended its relationship with TiVo and I've seen the commericals for their version of TiVo and even the commerial makes it look as though it's second rate to TiVo.
The tragety is that other than no way to get anything off of it other than to hook up some other video recorder and choosing the "Send to VCR" option it really is a great product.
A buddy of mine has the charter/comcast DVR and to put it bluntly, it's shit compared to a TiVo.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.