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Retailers Leak New TiVo HD Specs and Price

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the tastes-great-less-filling dept.

Brent writes "Retailers goofed and posted most of the specs of the forthcoming TiVo Series 3 Lite, which Ars says may be called 'TiVo HD' at launch. A comparison with the standard Series 3 shows that for a savings of $300, you only lose the OLED screen (do you need a screen on your TiVo?), the glowing remote (which you can pickup for $50 anyway), THX certification (worthless) and 90GB of storage. Looks like it may be a TiVo hacker's dream."

2 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Losers! by ArsonSmith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Let me help you out and parse it with bullet points: ... you only lose:
    *the OLED screen (do you need a screen on your TiVo?)
    *the glowing remote (which you can pick up for $50 anyway)
    *THX certification (worthless)
    *90GB of storage

    Now, why didn't 'you' parse the submission right?

    --
    Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
  2. Re:What? by phildawg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What makes this so great and a hacker's dream is because the features it loses that cannot be purchased were worthless. The main reason for the Tivo HD is strictly to be able to record at that quality level. A normal tivo cannot do that.

    So what you lose here that cannot be replaced is THX-certification which doesn't mean anything because who has a THX professionally installed, setup, and configured home sound system? The OLED display is no big loss.

    The losses that people would miss are the glow in the dark remote (which can be replaced for 50 dollars) and ESPECIALLY the additionally recording space. The 600 dollar Series 3 has a 300GB hard drive and can record about 30 hours of HD content at that quality setting. This will have a 210 GB hard drive which can record about 20-21 hours of HD content.

    It should be noted that a typical normal tivo right now comes with about 80 hours worth of programming space, so the 30 and 21 hours of HD quality recording really is a setback, but fortunately you can record programs at lower quality on the HD Tivo's.

    However, what makes this is the hackers dream, is for roughly 700 dollars (only 100 dollars more than the top 30 hour tivo HD), you could purchase the remote and replace the 210GB drive with Hitachi's new 1TB drive and turn it into a 100 hour Tivo HD... which is truly awesome! And within a year we will probably see 1.5TB-2TB drives that could be put into this for even more recording volume.