PVRblog

CBS News on the Home Media Option

Larry Magid has a glowing piece for CBS News on the Home Media Option: "TiVo: Endless Entertainment." It mostly focuses on the multi-room viewing option and mentions the slow throughput of 802.11 networking. With an hour of TiVo taking up a Gb of space, moving a 2 hour movie could easily take more than an hour to transfer between boxes wirelessly. He also notes the high cost of this kind of setup. While convenient, it'd run the average person $249 * 2 (for the tivos) + $99 +$49 (for two subscriptions to the HMO) = $650 (ouch!)

How much space do I need in a new TiVo?

When you go to buy a PVR like a TiVo, the first question you're faced with is the size of it: do you want a 40 hour or an 80 hour for a bit more? 40 and 80 hours sounds like a lot, more than anyone could watch in a week, but try not to think in those terms when determining what works best for you. The size of your TiVo really just means how quickly things auto-delete themselves, and answering what size is best for you depends on your lifestyle and viewing habits.

Say you had a 30-40 hour maximum Tivo and you watched maybe two hours of TV a day (say, The Daily Show, an episode of Frontline, and a Simpsons episode). Typically a TiVo will record more hours than you can watch (especially as it grabs shows it thinks you might like), so there will be a good deal of attrition, and sometimes that is a problem. For the ~40hr tivo, this would mean that shows would typically last 3-4 days on your Tivo before deleting themselves to make way for new shows. If you have time to sit down and watch recorded TV every couple days, a smaller tivo drive will work fine. If, on the other hand, you only find time on weekends to watch the previous week's TV you will run into problems. Problems take the form of things like being furious that last week's Six Feet Under was deleted before you ever got to see it, and the repeats of it weren't taped because TiVo already had a copy of it (which was eventually deleted).

For me personally, bigger is better due to my habits. I go for days without turning a TV on, and sometimes I lie around all weekend catching up on the previous week or two. It all started with the last World Cup of soccer, and a 10 day vacation that started just as my tivo would be taping dozens of 2+ hour games. Right before I left I added a 80 hour drive to my Directivo that meant all the games were waiting for me when I got home. Later when I had problems with the tivo motherboard (not related to the upgrade), I decided to upgrade the fresh new unit Tivo sent me. I eventually had 200Gb of tivo storage, which meant I always had a couple dozen movies taped off HBO that lasted literally for months and months. I ended up quitting Netflix when I got this setup, and instead relied on HBO and a few pay-per-view movies to fill my needs. I had dozens of episodes of my favorte shows going back about six months.

Upgrading a TiVo after you've bought one is pretty easy if you are comfortable with taking apart your PC. If not, it is much easier to just start with a new larger drive in a new TiVo that won't need upgrading so soon.

ReplayTV vs TiVo on Captioning

James Beary is a deaf ReplayTV owner and recently shared his frustrations and offered a positive review of TiVo in regards to closed captioning, based on feedback from deaf TiVo owners. [thanks Joe]

Onebox Media Center

Niveus has released a Windows Media Center PC that aims to be more of an entertainment unit, than a PC. I've heard from owners of previous media center PCs say that at weird times using the remote in front of a TV, you find a task that requires you to go back to your desk and interact as a computer. It sounds like this company has bundled some of their own software to make the PC moments possible on a TV screen (with a mouse on the remote), though this review seems to find it tedious at best. [via Gizmodo]

The story of an upgrade

Michael over at Cruftbox has a nice little writeup of recent upgrades to his TiVo, with photos.

DirecTv and the Phillips DSR 6000

In early 2002 I purchased a Phillips DSR 6000 from American Satellite, at a cost of only about $30 with shipping and tax. I was a new customer of DirecTv and if I stayed for a year, the TiVo would essentially be nearly free. Many retailers still offer deals such as these.

This was my second TiVo (first being a 35hr Series 1 machine I won in a TiVo contest in 2000), and my first time as a Directv user. I was instantly impressed at the picture quality of digital TV. Having owned a ~10 year old 27" mid-range television for the past few years, I never really thought I'd notice higher quality input but it was instantly apparent: the crystal clear picture was a definite improvement. Phillips has since replaced the DSR 6000 with a newer DSR 7000 model built on the Series 2 Tivo system, but the system served me well and I hear they are still in great demand on eBay due to their hackability (to get free directv, not just tivo hacking).

PVRs and the gay cutting edge

While there were jokey stories a few months ago ("Tivo thinks I'm gay!") about TiVo's recommendation system suggesting shows an owner didn't know they liked, it turns out that Forrester Research has found gay consumers are among the earliest technology adopters. They are "two times more likely to own PVRs like TiVo" and use the internet for shopping and research. Who knows, maybe someday we'll see technology advertised directly to this market, instead of TiVo's subtle homophobic commercials of the past (I'd link to their ad called "Educational TV" but I can't find a free copy of it online).

How to setup a new TiVo without a phone

Since I moved recently, I went with a Vonage phone that works with my cable modem instead of opting for a standard landline from the local teleco. I knew going in that Vonage clearly states: "We do not currently support DirecTV and TiVo."

So instead, I checked around the TiVo Community and noticed a lot of people happy with their Linksys wusb11 wireless adapter. The problem I found tonight is one of the first steps in the guided setup requires a call to TiVo. All the TiVo docs about getting your machine on a LAN present screens from a fully functioning Tivo, and there didn't seem to be a way around it in the setup.

I decided to call customer service and get the secret backdoor to skipping the call. The customer service phone number listed on the TiVo site has turned into what my friend Merlin dubs "phone jail". You can't hit buttons, skip to a live person, or otherwise get around a slow talking robot that requires you to speak in order to issue commands. Eventually when the robot couldn't help me they gave out the real customer service number: (505) 348-2800. After talking to a human it was revealed that you can't setup a brand-new tivo without a landline. The reason he said, was that TiVo doesn't ship all new units with the 4.0 OS, and without it, LAN connectivity doesn't function. He said that hopefully in the next six months, setups without phonelines would be possible, but currently it was not.

I want to give you money TiVo

As much as I love TiVo, their website has been giving me fits. The first problem I encountered was ordering it. Despite entering in my contact information exactly like it was on my bank statements, the site refused to sell me one and kept giving me invalid home address errors. I spent an hour on the phone with their customer service, only to be told they got the same errors when they tried it. My bank meanwhile was giving approval codes and I got a call from them asking me if I really authorized the purchase of 10 TiVos. The problem was never resolved and I ended up ordering it after a recent move and update of my address with the bank.

Tonight I tried to activate the new series2 project TiVo, but I encountered error after error. I repeated my entries several times, attempting to figure it out. It appears at least for me, that I can't activate a TiVo and also order the Home Media Option or change the system name of my TiVo, even though those are options on the signup page. Worse yet, I get an unhelpful error (in red text, it says error, try back again later and then there is a long string of ascii that appears to be a hash of some sort). By skipping the Home Media $99 and keeping my cryptic name, I got through, though I guess I'll try to adding the Home Media option later.

TiVo, I want to give you my money, if you'd just let me do it.

Linux PVR

Telly is a new linux-based home media device that can record TV, play DVDs and music CDs, and store movie, music, and photos on the 80Gb drive, offers networking, and sports a web-based interface to boot. It includes a subscription-free program guide, but at $899, it seems pretty pricey for a linux-based system. [via /.]