Over the weekend we had success in finding a USB Wireless Adapter for our TiVo box, so now I can pimp it freely without having to worry that it would end up a glorified paperweight in a few days time…
We love it, seriously, we never really watched much TV outside of Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy and House, now we’re watching so much it’s criminal, Robyn has went crazy recording all the freaky shows on TLC and Discovery. As you can see on the left, it’s weird shows like “Face Eating Tumor” and “The 750-Pound Man” that she’s into…
After the whole painful drama that purchasing a network adapter caused, I was wondering if it was worth it, but since we got it hooked up it’s now updated to the latest software which allows it to stream music and view photos over the network (handy if you think about it, especially if we want to show off wedding photos) and we can transfer programs to the computers to watch there, or convert them for iPod viewing use. I also get Rocketboom downloaded for 3 or 4 minutes of silly news a day.
Now I know what your thinking, that you dont need anything like TiVo, but trust me, once you get it set up and you press the pause button or rewind for the first time, that’s it… You’re hooked. There’s no going back from then on. Then you go deeper and tell it what shows you like and set up season passes for first run only or repeats so you need never worry about missing anything ever again, I need no longer worry about going to APWBWGTTD meetings and missing Lost. Which is funny, as at the last one when I suggested they move the meetings to a non-Lost weeknight, I was told to get a TiVo.
Infact, as it’s hooked up to our network, we don’t even need to be home program it! TiVo Central allows us to login from any computer anywhere and select programs to record, and through Yahoo! TV I can tell it to record stuff via my phone, the wonders of technology…
Another bonus of it is since we got our new TV a little over a month ago, we lost the TV guide that was built into the old TV (we just have basic cable with no box) so now we don’t have to worry about channel hopping or going to the PC to lookup TV Guide, lazy I know, but you’d be surprised how clueless you’d be without an on screen TV guide nowadays…
It does have it’s downsides though, like no HDTV support (yet!) so if we want to watch HD we have to switch over to regular TV, multiple tuners like the DirecTiVo’s have would be cool, so if we were recording one channel, we could still watch another with the TiVo options instead of switching over to regular TV, and I’d really like it if the live TV buffer was longer than 30 minutes, say an hour… But other than that I have no complains at all, infact I’d go as far as saying I’m overjoyed with this.
Long live the TiVolution!
Comments
6 responses to “TiVolution”
I’ve had Tivo for over 4 years now and I can totally back you up on this. I don’t realize how much you need it until you have it… Welcome to the TiVolution!
Awesome. Welcome to the Tivolution. I am pissed at Tivo/Comcast right now… they did an “update” and deleted some of our channels, and now, we don’t have them in the tivo guide, but they are still on comcast! I am pissed because one of those channels was one we watched all the time (Logo). Hope Tivo/Comcast don’t work together in cahoots to fuck up TV watching ever again!
It still isn’t fixed.
My parents have just bought a PVR. It’s not a TiVo – they haven’t really taken off here despite being the longest-established – but it does have an on-screen programme guide and a similar functionality to Season Pass. It also has 2 tuners.
Yes, we love it, infact Robyn just came in and asked what I was watching, so I told her and she was like “when did you record that?” I said it was “live” tv…
Her response? “Live tv? I don’t even know what that is now”
:P
@ Neil, TiVo prolly hasnt taken off as I believe they only sell Series 1’s in the UK, plus Sky has their Sky+ system which is as good as a TiVo (comparable to DirecTiVo’s here)
I’m planning to ditch my vcr/dvd and grab some kind of HD/DVD combi recorder. Tivo sounds interesting but my main issues are along the lines of what the functionality is like in the UK, and more importantly what do the services cost !
I know Sky+ is similar but we just ditched Sky for Freeview because we were sick of watching the repeats, and the costs just kept spiraling, so going back to sky purely for the HD recording would be a bit senseless.
I guess more investigation is in order, anyone got any pointers?
There are no HD recorders in the UK as of today. TiVo don’t sell recorders per se, they licence their tech to third parties. Thomson was the only third party licensed to make TiVos for the UK market, and they stopped making them a couple of years ago. At last count I think there were around thirty to forty thousand of them in the UK, all fully supported by TiVo’s customer support service which is actually supplied in the UK by BSkyB of all places.
I sold my TiVo last year and I’ve regretted it ever since, even though my Sky+ box gives me a much better picture. I miss season passes something awful :(
I’m in the process of building a triple tuner MythTV backend system with a lovely Ubuntu workstation frontend plugged into the TV — it’s not for the faint hearted, but the payoff will be huge: two digital terrestrial tuners, one analogue tuner with a Sky digibox plugged in for Freesat channels, full PVR functionality (timed recordings, trick play, EPG), other-media playback (DVDs, VCDs, CDs, MP3/WMA/AAC/Ogg/etc, MPEG1/AVI/DivX/Xvid/Theora/MPEG4/etc), MAME, and so on.
If you’re looking for just a Freeview PVR that has DVD±R/RW capability, Sony are doing a couple just now which do that, but are a bit expensive. OK, they’re very expensive! If you can cope with the hassle of burning programmes off via a PC connected by USB, you could do worse than the Humax PVR 9200T.