Frequently TiVo fills its drive with a bunch of stuff that is largely uninteresting - that then needs to be deleted.
Er, did you ever bother to thumbsup/thumbsdown *anything*? If you did, the TiVo would start molding its choices based on your preferences. Also, the TiVo Suggestions are the first thing to go when space is needed for a chosen recording - you should never, ever need to delete them. For me, it's always recording something that's fairly close to my tastes, so I'm perfectly happy to leave it on.
HD DVR - 1080i(p?) recording. 160 GB drive. Two tuner record and watch capability. Show listings. No advertisements in the UI. And it comes with HDMI Out and Optical audio out of the box. All for the fabulous low price of 5.95/mo with no money down. As an added bonus, it requires only three cables to hookup to a good HD TV - HDMI, Power Cord and Coax feed from the cable company.
Funny, that's the same set of connections I use to connect my Series3 - Ethernet, video out to receiver, cable in (and antenna for OTA NTSC/ATSC, which that cableco box won't record - there are channels your cableco may not pull in that might have something you'd like), and power. Also, I hope you like returning that cableco DVR every couple of months when it craps out on you again. Search around - the Moto and SA DVRs have lots of problems, and lots of customers who have used them and hate them because they're constantly breaking for no apparent reason. Is losing all your saved shows every month or two okay with you? Hope so, because it'll probably be a way of life.
I fail to see how TiVo can possibly remain relevant in the face of this overwhelming opposition. In my mind there is no way that that $300 and a monthly service fee can compete with the Cable guys option. As a personal point of irritation, paying for a service (apart from TV, which is a whole separate conversation) and then being advertised to is simply unacceptable.
Because they manage to still provide a value proposition - they offer a box that (*gasp*) works, without constantly breaking, that gives you some actual choice in how you want to watch TV, less ads than most current cableco DVRs, the ability to watch TV from OTA sources if you choose, TiVo suggestions (which I and some other people find handy), Season Passes (yes, I know some cableco DVRs have something similar, which seems to be almost universally poorly implemented and all but broken)... every time I use my TiVo I find a reason to be happy with it.
My thought for TiVo when I made the switch is that TiVo needs to exit the hardware business ASAP and start licensing their technologies to the cable companies. I imagine a model similar to Direct TV would be good. The cable boxes that I've gotten from RCN and Comcast both could use some UI improvements (RCN is def. not as good as Comcast).
The cable companies don't want to pay an outside firm like TiVo, because they think they can do it for cheaper - the problem is, the boxes they provide kinda suck. Go do a little searching, and see all the bad reviews actual customers have given the different cableco DVRs. Yet they keep trying, and somehow managing to do worse, not better.
Either that or sell me a box and don't ask me for any more cash.
Sony and LG made boxes like that for awhile - HD DVRs even. They stopped making them. Why? No one bought them. No one wanted them. They're still available on sites like eBay, but they're still a far cry from TiVo.
See eBay, or another auction site, for pricing - looks like you might be able to get the DHG-HDD250 for sub-US$300 prices if you play your cards right, though it seems the LG unit is more expensive.
You're not going to be recording HDTV on a DVD recorder (the source might be HD, but what you'll watch afterward will be downconverted to DVD resolution). There have been HD DVRs with no monthly fees from the likes of Sony (the DHG-HDD250/500) and LG (the LST-3410A) - but the guide info is unreliable at best (using TVGoS pulled from an analog channel, and there's debate about whether they'll be able to pull it from an ATSC channel after analog shutoff) and the popularity of the boxes was low, so they stopped making them. I know the Sony unit is single tuner, as well - not sure about the LG.
You can still get these boxes used - sometimes new in box - off of eBay though. If you're really interested, check out the discussion threads on AVSForum, in the "HDTV Recorders" forum.
The Series3 TiVo (and the new TiVo HD, mentioned in the article) don't have *any* video inputs like the Series2 and prior units. The only way you can get video into the unit is via antenna (NTSC, ATSC) or cable (analog cable, or digital cable with CableCARD) - though there's also TiVoCast and Amazon Unbox. Hopefully TiVoToComeBack will make an appearance in the near future as well, so you can upload shows from a computer to your TiVo for watching on your TV. However, connecting directly to a cableco box to get your video is right out with the new boxes.
So get yourself an eSATA drive, or a SATA drive and an eSATA enclosure for it. It's totally worth it. Then you can store lots of movies (I have 750 GB total right now; I've got probably 20 HD movies, plus all of Planet Earth in HD, concerts, and other HD stuff, along with some IFC digital movies and other content).
You aren't going to go to the corner shop and get an HD capture card - you need to be able to get the raw bitstream, which for most anything other than OTA HD channels, the cable MSOs guard with their lives. Some channels can be captured via FireWire, assuming your cable MSO provides a box with a FireWire connector - a lot still don't, even though they're really supposed to, and anything with 5C encryption (generally everything other than the retransmitted OTA HD feeds) is right out. So now, how am I going to record DiscoveryHD without an HD TiVo, other than getting the cableco's shitty DVR (which will probably need replacing every couple months)? Oh wait, don't think so, sorry...
It did in fact say in the article that it can accept either one MCard (multistream CableCARD) or two SCards (single-stream CableCARDS) - hopefully if that's the case we'll see MCard capability added on the existing Series3 boxes soon (I have one, and love it).
And you're right about the limitations of digital cable without CableCARD - I'm fighting with my local MSO about CableCARDs now (they're supposed to give them to me, they say they don't have to, TiVo has stepped in, and hopefully I'll hear back by the end of this week).
I've not yet heard anything particularly positive about any cable MSO or satellite company DVR in terms of reliability or interface quality - about the best I've heard, at least about a few of them, is "well, they work... mostly". TiVo seems to be one of the few exceptions in the DVR space - you own it, it's generally quite reliable, and it has a nice, easy to use interface. In short - it's better. Really.
1) 2-way cablecards... so I can still access on-demand content from Comcast
It's not TiVo's fault, and it's not a feature/misfeature/lack of feature due to the CableCards themselves. CableLabs doesn't want to allow bidirectional communications on any box that doesn't use OCAP. Unfortunately OCAP, by design, won't allow the box manufacturers to run their own software on it directly - you must run *only* an OCAP stack. If a box maker wanted to run their own application, they'd have to submit the software separately to CableLabs for certification, then get the cable MSOs to carry the software - and you'd then have to pay the MSO *extra* for the privilege of running that software. Isn't that just a kick in the nuts?
If you don't like it, register your displeasure with your representative, and/or call up the FCC and express your displeasure to them. Tell them that two-way CableCARD is important to you, and that OCAP is bad. That's the only way the current situation will change - the cable companies are dead set on making OCAP required for two-way communication, and unless the FCC steps in, like they did with CableCARD in the first place, and tells them how it's going to be, they're going to continue doing things their way.
There seems to be a real push to get TTG going, which I'm guessing will include MRV. Obviously HD shows transferred to a Series2 are right out for clear technical reasons. I don't know about digital SD content though, since it'll have Dolby Digital audio instead of straight PCM - real time transcoding of audio during transfer? Who knows. I've heard murmurs that the next software release may include it. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, anyway.
It's not about never revealing anything - it's about being in control of what you reveal, instead of being told what you will and will not share, and whom you will and won't share it with. If I want to write my thoughts up on a weblog (I don't, but if I did...), and I make it public, I just made a conscious choice to put that out there. It's not like being spied upon - there no one's *asking* you to share, your privacy is invaded - thereby stripping away your choice. That's what it all comes back to - choice.
Well, CableCard does work - sometimes. I have two of them working happily in my TiVo Series3. However, if you're talking about OCUR-"equipped" Vista PCs, then you got pranked pretty bad, man.
Here are a few other things to consider when getting a unit from your cable provider on lease instead of buying a Tivo or some other unit: 1) no up front expense,
Yes, and most use crappy Scientific Atlanta boxes, or slightly less crappy Motorola boxes. If you're okay with that, then more power to ya, but I'm not.
2) Unit is under warranty, and is replaced free, in your home,
Unfortunately, in the case of the cableco DVRs, from what I've heard you need this - I've heard of so many people with them that have had *multiple* cableco DVRs fail with no explanation, only to call up the cableco, have it swapped out, and awhile later die pretty much the same way. The cableco has no useful explanation as to why, of course.
3) you can swap the unit out for a newer or better model at will by stopping by the cable office.
This is nice, but there's something to be said for keeping your unit - especially when it's a DVR, (presumably) chock full of things you actually want to watch, like my S3 TiVo is (HD movies and concerts from HDnet/HDnet Movies, all of Planet Earth in HD, several IFC movies, other DiscoveryHD programs, the latest episode of "The Closer", and so forth). If I had to replace my HD DVR, I'd be pissed.
Unfortunately in the US, that'd make far too much sense - we have to have our own different standards. If only we could cooperate on those kinds of standards - it took us years to get RDS, and other things that Europeans have taken for granted for many years.
BitTorrent of what, standard def? DVD rips? Even if you can get HD rips, there's a *big* difference between your 21" LCD and a 46" HDTV - and the surround sound is nothing to sneeze at either. I'm no fan of DRM, but I'd rather go with an option where I have some features than one where I don't (cableco craptastic DVRs) or ones that apparently are totally non-functional (these OCUR-equipped(?) systems). I only BitTorrent stuff I can't get in the US (Ghost in the Shell: SAC before it came to the US, Doctor Who, TopGear) - and I try to buy it on DVD so I actually show up as a blip on their stats - then they can say "oh, hey, American audiences *do* like this stuff!"
Er, 8VSB and 256QAM have no relationship to compression - they're just ways to get a digital signal from point A to point B, via air or cable, in a reasonably reliable fashion. Both still employ MPEG-2 encoding for the video and Dolby Digital for audio, wrapped in an MPEG-2 transport stream mux/encap format. Admittedly, some cable companies do recompress the signals before sending them over cable, but that's not always the case.
Planet Earth, in high def. I have the entire series on my S3 TiVo. I've watched some of them - with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround. It's totally engrossing and absolutely beautiful. If you haven't seen it - you have no clue what you're missing. So, so hot.
Incorrect. CableCards are paired with the customer device, but they can be unpaired at the head-end. It would be pretty retarded of the cable companies to offer CableCards for devices that can never be reused.
I know there've *been* problems, but I do know of people quite happily using TiVo Series3 units on Comcast (I'm on TW, but a friend in MN is with Comcast). Really, none of the cable companies have given their techs proper training - the guy that installed my CableCards was apparently pretty much exclusively field-trained, and he'd only installed one before, in someone's flatpanel TV. By now, however, I'd think most installers have at least a little CableCard experience, as my install was about 7 months ago.
And of course, yes, the cable companies don't want to encourage anything CableCard based that they have something comparable to - but they can't stop you if you do, as long as it's properly licensed and certified. You just have to be insistent.
Well, pcHDTV is the board that's primarily aimed at Linux, right? That'll have to go away - and CableLabs is pretty picky about how you can use digital cable signals, so it'd be pretty locked down. Also, you'd still be stuck buying a (probably expensive - they all have been so far) new system with the board paired and locked to the machine.
Agreed. I'm happy with my S3, and I've got an eSATA hard drive cabled up, so it's loaded with HD goodness. This article definitely proves you're not missing a thing by going with TiVo, at least nothing other than serious headaches.
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Frequently TiVo fills its drive with a bunch of stuff that is largely uninteresting - that then needs to be deleted.
Er, did you ever bother to thumbsup/thumbsdown *anything*? If you did, the TiVo would start molding its choices based on your preferences. Also, the TiVo Suggestions are the first thing to go when space is needed for a chosen recording - you should never, ever need to delete them. For me, it's always recording something that's fairly close to my tastes, so I'm perfectly happy to leave it on.
HD DVR - 1080i(p?) recording. 160 GB drive. Two tuner record and watch capability. Show listings. No advertisements in the UI. And it comes with HDMI Out and Optical audio out of the box. All for the fabulous low price of 5.95/mo with no money down. As an added bonus, it requires only three cables to hookup to a good HD TV - HDMI, Power Cord and Coax feed from the cable company.
Funny, that's the same set of connections I use to connect my Series3 - Ethernet, video out to receiver, cable in (and antenna for OTA NTSC/ATSC, which that cableco box won't record - there are channels your cableco may not pull in that might have something you'd like), and power. Also, I hope you like returning that cableco DVR every couple of months when it craps out on you again. Search around - the Moto and SA DVRs have lots of problems, and lots of customers who have used them and hate them because they're constantly breaking for no apparent reason. Is losing all your saved shows every month or two okay with you? Hope so, because it'll probably be a way of life.
I fail to see how TiVo can possibly remain relevant in the face of this overwhelming opposition. In my mind there is no way that that $300 and a monthly service fee can compete with the Cable guys option. As a personal point of irritation, paying for a service (apart from TV, which is a whole separate conversation) and then being advertised to is simply unacceptable.
Because they manage to still provide a value proposition - they offer a box that (*gasp*) works, without constantly breaking, that gives you some actual choice in how you want to watch TV, less ads than most current cableco DVRs, the ability to watch TV from OTA sources if you choose, TiVo suggestions (which I and some other people find handy), Season Passes (yes, I know some cableco DVRs have something similar, which seems to be almost universally poorly implemented and all but broken)... every time I use my TiVo I find a reason to be happy with it.
My thought for TiVo when I made the switch is that TiVo needs to exit the hardware business ASAP and start licensing their technologies to the cable companies. I imagine a model similar to Direct TV would be good. The cable boxes that I've gotten from RCN and Comcast both could use some UI improvements (RCN is def. not as good as Comcast).
The cable companies don't want to pay an outside firm like TiVo, because they think they can do it for cheaper - the problem is, the boxes they provide kinda suck. Go do a little searching, and see all the bad reviews actual customers have given the different cableco DVRs. Yet they keep trying, and somehow managing to do worse, not better.
Either that or sell me a box and don't ask me for any more cash.
Sony and LG made boxes like that for awhile - HD DVRs even. They stopped making them. Why? No one bought them. No one wanted them. They're still available on sites like eBay, but they're still a far cry from TiVo.
See eBay, or another auction site, for pricing - looks like you might be able to get the DHG-HDD250 for sub-US$300 prices if you play your cards right, though it seems the LG unit is more expensive.
You're not going to be recording HDTV on a DVD recorder (the source might be HD, but what you'll watch afterward will be downconverted to DVD resolution). There have been HD DVRs with no monthly fees from the likes of Sony (the DHG-HDD250/500) and LG (the LST-3410A) - but the guide info is unreliable at best (using TVGoS pulled from an analog channel, and there's debate about whether they'll be able to pull it from an ATSC channel after analog shutoff) and the popularity of the boxes was low, so they stopped making them. I know the Sony unit is single tuner, as well - not sure about the LG.
You can still get these boxes used - sometimes new in box - off of eBay though. If you're really interested, check out the discussion threads on AVSForum, in the "HDTV Recorders" forum.
Or get an eSATA drive, plug it in, reboot, hold Pause till the light comes on, enter 6, then 2. Wait a bit, and presto - more disk space.
The Series3 TiVo (and the new TiVo HD, mentioned in the article) don't have *any* video inputs like the Series2 and prior units. The only way you can get video into the unit is via antenna (NTSC, ATSC) or cable (analog cable, or digital cable with CableCARD) - though there's also TiVoCast and Amazon Unbox. Hopefully TiVoToComeBack will make an appearance in the near future as well, so you can upload shows from a computer to your TiVo for watching on your TV. However, connecting directly to a cableco box to get your video is right out with the new boxes.
So get yourself an eSATA drive, or a SATA drive and an eSATA enclosure for it. It's totally worth it. Then you can store lots of movies (I have 750 GB total right now; I've got probably 20 HD movies, plus all of Planet Earth in HD, concerts, and other HD stuff, along with some IFC digital movies and other content).
You aren't going to go to the corner shop and get an HD capture card - you need to be able to get the raw bitstream, which for most anything other than OTA HD channels, the cable MSOs guard with their lives. Some channels can be captured via FireWire, assuming your cable MSO provides a box with a FireWire connector - a lot still don't, even though they're really supposed to, and anything with 5C encryption (generally everything other than the retransmitted OTA HD feeds) is right out. So now, how am I going to record DiscoveryHD without an HD TiVo, other than getting the cableco's shitty DVR (which will probably need replacing every couple months)? Oh wait, don't think so, sorry...
It did in fact say in the article that it can accept either one MCard (multistream CableCARD) or two SCards (single-stream CableCARDS) - hopefully if that's the case we'll see MCard capability added on the existing Series3 boxes soon (I have one, and love it).
And you're right about the limitations of digital cable without CableCARD - I'm fighting with my local MSO about CableCARDs now (they're supposed to give them to me, they say they don't have to, TiVo has stepped in, and hopefully I'll hear back by the end of this week).
I've not yet heard anything particularly positive about any cable MSO or satellite company DVR in terms of reliability or interface quality - about the best I've heard, at least about a few of them, is "well, they work... mostly". TiVo seems to be one of the few exceptions in the DVR space - you own it, it's generally quite reliable, and it has a nice, easy to use interface. In short - it's better. Really.
1) 2-way cablecards ... so I can still access on-demand content from Comcast
It's not TiVo's fault, and it's not a feature/misfeature/lack of feature due to the CableCards themselves. CableLabs doesn't want to allow bidirectional communications on any box that doesn't use OCAP. Unfortunately OCAP, by design, won't allow the box manufacturers to run their own software on it directly - you must run *only* an OCAP stack. If a box maker wanted to run their own application, they'd have to submit the software separately to CableLabs for certification, then get the cable MSOs to carry the software - and you'd then have to pay the MSO *extra* for the privilege of running that software. Isn't that just a kick in the nuts?
If you don't like it, register your displeasure with your representative, and/or call up the FCC and express your displeasure to them. Tell them that two-way CableCARD is important to you, and that OCAP is bad. That's the only way the current situation will change - the cable companies are dead set on making OCAP required for two-way communication, and unless the FCC steps in, like they did with CableCARD in the first place, and tells them how it's going to be, they're going to continue doing things their way.
There seems to be a real push to get TTG going, which I'm guessing will include MRV. Obviously HD shows transferred to a Series2 are right out for clear technical reasons. I don't know about digital SD content though, since it'll have Dolby Digital audio instead of straight PCM - real time transcoding of audio during transfer? Who knows. I've heard murmurs that the next software release may include it. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, anyway.
It's not about never revealing anything - it's about being in control of what you reveal, instead of being told what you will and will not share, and whom you will and won't share it with. If I want to write my thoughts up on a weblog (I don't, but if I did...), and I make it public, I just made a conscious choice to put that out there. It's not like being spied upon - there no one's *asking* you to share, your privacy is invaded - thereby stripping away your choice. That's what it all comes back to - choice.
Well, CableCard does work - sometimes. I have two of them working happily in my TiVo Series3. However, if you're talking about OCUR-"equipped" Vista PCs, then you got pranked pretty bad, man.
Here are a few other things to consider when getting a unit from your cable provider on lease instead of buying a Tivo or some other unit: 1) no up front expense,
Yes, and most use crappy Scientific Atlanta boxes, or slightly less crappy Motorola boxes. If you're okay with that, then more power to ya, but I'm not.
2) Unit is under warranty, and is replaced free, in your home,
Unfortunately, in the case of the cableco DVRs, from what I've heard you need this - I've heard of so many people with them that have had *multiple* cableco DVRs fail with no explanation, only to call up the cableco, have it swapped out, and awhile later die pretty much the same way. The cableco has no useful explanation as to why, of course.
3) you can swap the unit out for a newer or better model at will by stopping by the cable office.
This is nice, but there's something to be said for keeping your unit - especially when it's a DVR, (presumably) chock full of things you actually want to watch, like my S3 TiVo is (HD movies and concerts from HDnet/HDnet Movies, all of Planet Earth in HD, several IFC movies, other DiscoveryHD programs, the latest episode of "The Closer", and so forth). If I had to replace my HD DVR, I'd be pissed.
Except for the fact that they really suck...
Unfortunately in the US, that'd make far too much sense - we have to have our own different standards. If only we could cooperate on those kinds of standards - it took us years to get RDS, and other things that Europeans have taken for granted for many years.
Yes, let me know how that goes. Please tell your cable company with this. Let me know how long and loud they laugh for...
BitTorrent of what, standard def? DVD rips? Even if you can get HD rips, there's a *big* difference between your 21" LCD and a 46" HDTV - and the surround sound is nothing to sneeze at either. I'm no fan of DRM, but I'd rather go with an option where I have some features than one where I don't (cableco craptastic DVRs) or ones that apparently are totally non-functional (these OCUR-equipped(?) systems). I only BitTorrent stuff I can't get in the US (Ghost in the Shell: SAC before it came to the US, Doctor Who, TopGear) - and I try to buy it on DVD so I actually show up as a blip on their stats - then they can say "oh, hey, American audiences *do* like this stuff!"
Well, at least until 2009.
Er, 8VSB and 256QAM have no relationship to compression - they're just ways to get a digital signal from point A to point B, via air or cable, in a reasonably reliable fashion. Both still employ MPEG-2 encoding for the video and Dolby Digital for audio, wrapped in an MPEG-2 transport stream mux/encap format. Admittedly, some cable companies do recompress the signals before sending them over cable, but that's not always the case.
Planet Earth, in high def. I have the entire series on my S3 TiVo. I've watched some of them - with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround. It's totally engrossing and absolutely beautiful. If you haven't seen it - you have no clue what you're missing. So, so hot.
Incorrect. CableCards are paired with the customer device, but they can be unpaired at the head-end. It would be pretty retarded of the cable companies to offer CableCards for devices that can never be reused.
I know there've *been* problems, but I do know of people quite happily using TiVo Series3 units on Comcast (I'm on TW, but a friend in MN is with Comcast). Really, none of the cable companies have given their techs proper training - the guy that installed my CableCards was apparently pretty much exclusively field-trained, and he'd only installed one before, in someone's flatpanel TV. By now, however, I'd think most installers have at least a little CableCard experience, as my install was about 7 months ago.
And of course, yes, the cable companies don't want to encourage anything CableCard based that they have something comparable to - but they can't stop you if you do, as long as it's properly licensed and certified. You just have to be insistent.
Well, pcHDTV is the board that's primarily aimed at Linux, right? That'll have to go away - and CableLabs is pretty picky about how you can use digital cable signals, so it'd be pretty locked down. Also, you'd still be stuck buying a (probably expensive - they all have been so far) new system with the board paired and locked to the machine.
Just get a TiVo S3 and be done with it.
Agreed. I'm happy with my S3, and I've got an eSATA hard drive cabled up, so it's loaded with HD goodness. This article definitely proves you're not missing a thing by going with TiVo, at least nothing other than serious headaches.