This both fascinates and terrifies me.
[HAL9000]“I thought you might like this show, Dave.”[/HAL9000]
Does it work with regular cable or do you have to have digital or some other fancy cable?
It works with any cable or satellite system, vv. The only thing that might cause a problem is if you’re on some small local-only cable provider. TiVo doesn’t use programming info from the cable provider, it downloads it via modem from the TiVo database. If your cable company’s info isn’t in the database, the system won’t work.
The good news is that when I encountered the problem, TiVo cleared it up in less than a week. I provided a phone number for my cable company, and they arranged to get all the programming info and added to their database. They periodically screw up the description on Samurai Jack episodes, but everything else works great.
The autorecording is fairly simpleminded. It works by genres. Every program is marked as belonging to one or more categories–educational, children’s, sci-fi, etc. It counts the programs you record in each genre and adds points to the genre if you give a program a “thumbs-up” rating. Since I, for example, record mainly science fiction, anime, and nature shows, it looks for programs in that genre. If I’ve given a particular show an unfavorable rating, it ignores it. All of this means that I may come home and find that it’s recorded ST:TNG, The Invisible Man, and Cowboy Bebop on its own initiative. I won’t find Gundam Wing, OTOH, because it recorded it for me once, and I gave it a thumbs-down.
Oops–overlooked bafaa’s post the first time. I haven’t actually looked for a universal remote with TiVo functions, but even if there aren’t any out there, you could always go with a learning remote. You can program the buttons on those to replace pretty much any other remote–you just put them nose-to-nose, put the universal in learning mode, and press the buttons you want to program into it. The new remote picks up the IR from the old one and learns the code for the function. Newer versions allow you to download codes from the internet onto the remote. I’m pretty sure you can get learning remotes from most of the big electronics retailers.
I have been meaning to buy a DVR for a while now.
What kind should I get? Everybody seems to love TiVo, but it has no ethernet port like ReplayTV does. The idea of my PC and TV being on the same network kind of seems like the whole point. But, if ReplayTV has this obvious advantage, why does everyone seem to use TiVo? Better marketing?