I’m intrigued with the whole TiVo thing. Problem is, I don’t watch a lot of TV - mainly because I forget to watch the good ones, and when I do sit down to watch TV, there’s nothing good on. TiVo sounds like a good solution to this. I can be a geek girl and record Nova and Sheep in the Big City and that Yoga show that comes on at 6am and watch it whenever I want!
Er… except the Yoga stuff. And except the time I really need something interesting to watch - that is, when I’m sitting on my Spin bike trying to get some exercise. Sure would be good to have something interesting on to take my mind off how much my legs are hurting. Problem is, the exercise room is in the basement. There’s a TV and cable and a VCR and all that down there. But the TiVo would be installed on the main TV in the living room.
What are my choices here? The TiVo guys say I could just run a cable from the TiVo to the downstairs TV, but that has several problems. The first is that I’m in an old house, it’s not all that easy and sometimes downright impossible to run cable through the walls. Second, I’d have to be hooking and unhooking it every time I wanted to change the TV. That doesn’t sound like fun. Third, the remote and all that wouldn’t work if I were in the basement and the main TiVo thing is upstairs, right?
I suppose I could do something like record a show on a VHS tape and bring it downstairs as well, but that’s not particularly easy, either. It requires planning ahead, something I’m not good at.
What would be really nice would be to be able to record from the TiVo digitally to a R/W DVD. But aren’t R/W DVDs somewhat expensive? Even if they weren’t, would they work with TiVo?
What would be really cool is if TiVo had a mechanism to be hooked to a home network, allowing it to be accessed by any node on the network like a shared DVD or hard drive. I don’t suppose it does that, does it?
The TiVo guy has the right idea… but it doesn’t handle remote controls very well. There is a device that I installed on my upstairs TV that sends the I/R signal down the wire to my Dish Network box in the basement and that works like a charm… Perhaps you could try something like that and just have a splitter for the signal coming out of the TiVo box to both TV’s?
Athena, I have a ReplayTV unit myself. These are the same basic technology as TiVos, but less well known in general. I’m not entirely up-to-date on what TiVo units in specific have to offer, but I think I can be of some help regardless.
First, I think it sounds like you’ve got the exact right idea about your use of a Personal Video Recorder (PVR, I know it sounds silly, but that’s what they call 'em. . .) They do tend to increase the average quality of the TV you watch. Once you get one, you’ll probably never want to go back to watching TV without it.
To hook up two TVs at once, you could get a splitter or switch. That way you wouldn’t have to mess with the cables everytime you want to use a different TV. Some of the units even have multiple outputs that are active all the time. I have two signals coming out of my Replay; one cable goes to the TV and one goes to the VCR (for archiving purposes), but you could easily use another TV instead of the VCR. There are also devices that will let you use your remote control from another room. They are typically two boxes each with IR and RF receivers/transmitters. One is set up in the room with the devices you’re controling, and the other goes in the remote location. The boxes communicate with each otehr via RF signals, so walls aren’t an issue. I’ve had a bit of experience using them and they seem to work pretty well.
Also, the newer Replay units can be hooked to a home network. I don’t know about TiVo units. The catch, of course, is that you’d then have to have two Replays. . . But you can watch a show recorded from one unit on any unit in the system, so you’re also incresing your storage capacity at the same time. They are apparently even developing a wireless networking system for them. You can check out the newer Replays at www.replaytv.com . Also, www.avsforum.com has all kinds of info available, including forums dedicated to TiVo, Replay, and other PVRs.
www.x10.com has transmitters and receivers with which you can wirelessly send the signal to the second TV, as well as a RemoteSENDER product which will allow you to control the tivo from the basement.