TiVo HD

So we broke down and bought the TiVo HD but not without our fair share of ups and downs. After it got announced on Tuesday we debated if it was gonna be worth it, Dave and Duane jumped on the bandwagon soon enough. We were still holding off until Wednesday when Robyn said that the Circuit City on South Blvd had them in stock, in the store and we should just get one.

So I drove down there on my lunch break and picked one up, $327 poorer, but richer in my heart. It sat on my desk all afternoon teasing me and once I got home, even though I was pretty drained from a busy day at work, we unpacked it, basked in it’s glassy black finish and got to work unhooking the old TiVo and adding this new one to our little entertainment center. Soon enough we found out our old wireless network adapter wouldn’t work so I had to drive up to the nearest Best Buy in Mooresville (some 13 or so miles away) to buy an overprice TiVo branded network adapter, then came the long drawn out setup process of downloading all the channel info, setting up season passes and wishlists and what not. We also did a channel scan which brought up the 3 HD channels we already get, but as we don’t have that package (or CableCARDs) there was no information for those. We also noticed a strange couple of issues.

We connected the TiVo to our TV via an HDMI cable, and now there was a solid green line going down the side (see picture above) and if we watched anything except actual live TV, the picture would pixelate and jump about. So the next day we got a new HDMI cable, same issues, we called TiVo and they suggested replacing the box, so we called up the Circuit City and they still had one in stock, after racing down to near enough South Carolina, we had a new box (and the pain of setting that up too) which doesn’t pixelate or jump about but still had the green line, I guessed it was our TV and we had no other HDMI outputting devices to test it with. Thanks to the TiVo Community site, we were able to solve this, and it was a dumb error too… A simple task to moving the TV’s screen area to the right…

We also tried an OTA antenna to pick up HDTV but we quickly found out our living room is a blackspot for signals. So we’re biting the bullet and getting CableCARDs from Time Warner, they arrive on Tuesday. This also means we’re getting the basic digital cable package, yet more stuff to watch…

Anyways, those issues aside, I’m loving this new TiVo, when we were getting the HD channels they looked superb, even regular basic cable looks good upscaled to 1080i. It’s still the same old friendly TiVo bleep bloop bloop interface, though it’s been given a little glossy makeover, so setting up our season passes was a breeze. I’ll give a proper review once it’s fully operational, but even right now, for $300 you’re getting a box that blows away the current Series 2 DT version, I love that it only requires one coax cable going into it as opposed to two, and if you have digital cable (never mind HD) you can kiss that cable company box goodbye, and by all accounts, thats a good thing…

Glossy Interface

Originally uploaded by FLC.