I have a normal cable subscription, including several movie channels (HBO, Showtime, Starz) with a typical set top box. Is tivo still a thing? Could I get a tivo and then have it record, say, Lovecraft Country from my cable service and then I can play it back on tivo later?
I’ve never used tivo and don’t care what brand. Does anyone make set top dvrs that work with cable? Everything I google is all about setting up over-the-air dvrs for cord cutters. I can’t really cut the cord because of the hill situation around here; we’d need a massively giant antennae to receive any signal. (I would dearly love an alternative cabled solution from a different company, but alas…)
The reason I ask about 3rd party dvrs is because for years now we’ve been using both the whole house dvr (500 GB = 75 hours of HD) plus I also have a standalone set top box dvr for all my hundreds of crappy movies. That standalone dvr only holds around 25 hours of HD so when I went from standard def to HD years ago I added a 1 TB extender hard drive to bump it up to around 175 hours worth of storage. This setup has worked well for us ever since.
My DVR crapped out yesterday, as they usually do. This one lasted around 5 years, which was pretty good. They’d usually die in a year or two. Anyway, when I went to exchange it for a new one at the cable store today they told me they no longer offer that, they now only do multi-room dvr. It’s an upgrade, she assured me, as it has 75 hours of storage!
Except we’re already using that 75 hours (right at this moment our multi-room dvr is at 82%.) I’m looking for a way to add another 150 hours of storage on top of that. That’s a service my cable company no longer offers.
Quick googling shows a tivo box for a little over $200 plus $70 per year. That’s pricey but not out of the question. Alternative solutions welcome, though adding a full computer to be a dvr/bluray/streaming device would be problematic logistically.
Anyone have any ideas? Cord cutters are welcome to witness; at this point I’m weak and could be swayed. Maybe a satellite dish?
TiVo is great, and I believe it’s back to being very usable with cable. For a while there was a compatibility problem, but last time I checked, I think it was dealt with. If it’s an option for you, I recommend it. Very user friendly.
We still have a TiVo with lifetime service, but no longer have cable, so that’s why I’m not up on specifics. We very rarely watch anything other than our subscription services now.
You probably shouldn’t count on using a Tivo or any 3rd party DVR much longer with cable. Up until recently, cable companies had to provide something called a “cable card” which allowed the 3rd party equipment to understand the encrypted cable signal. But the recent FCC 20-124 did away with the cable card mandate and instead made it a recommendation. What that means for consumers is that cable companies are not likely to continue providing support for 3rd party DVRs, which they hated doing anyway. They may continue supporting any cable cards in the field, but consumers are already reporting that cable companies are not offering support for new cable cards.
An alternative might be getting TV using one of the internet-based providers. These services are called “Over The Top” providers. They deliver a cable TV experience, but it’s through an app over the internet similar to Netflix. I think You Tube TV offers an unlimited DVR, but shows are only kept for a limited time (9 months?).
Satellite tv providers (DISH, DirectTV) don’t really offer satellite internet, right? Meaning they have to supply set top dvrs that have their own internal hard drives?
That would be a nice Fuck You to the cable company; switch to satellite! Any satellite users here? Does the signal mess up on cloudy days?
If you keep your cable provider, there is something called Channels DVR, which is a program you install on your own computer and it connects to the various internet content providers to get content. You can add whatever storage you want to store however many shows you want to keep. It’s a little more complicated than a standalone device, but it would be a way to be a DVR-like replacement for what you currently have.
That’s promising, thanks much! Not sure I love the idea of having to have a computer actively running and not sleeping in order to watch tv. The outlets around my tv are very old; only one of them is 3-pronged, and I’ve got a bunch of AV stuff plugged into that one outlet already. (TV, cable box, roku, blu-ray, speakers, and HDMI switcher. Also my DVR Extender external hd, but that’s a doorstop now. Or pluggable into a new solution.) I could set it up in a different room without issue, but then I have to leave the room if it needs to be fiddled with. That’s not a deal-breaker, just not quite ideal.
Any other solutions I may not have thought of are welcome.
Sling is a streaming service that offers most of the same channels as a cable provider, but no local channels. They do have a DVR feature as well. I found them to be much cheaper than cable or satellite, but you will still need an internet provider.
Sling is just a streaming service, meaning I can try it out on my roku right now if I want? (I always thought SlingTV was its own hardware device, but I don’t know why I thought that. Did it used to be called SlingBox, maybe?)
Sling has no hardware; we access ours through firestick, or we can watch on computer. Sling’s “DVR” in the cloud. You get something like 10 hours included, or you can upgrade to 50 hours for an extra $5 per month. Thing is though the on demand helps a lot. Also as I understand it you can get a digital antenna for local channels and that can connect to DVR
I’m just now mourning the loss of the extreme usability of my old standalone dvr. Everything about the multi-room dvr is sluggish, with around a 3-second delay between pressing a button on the remote and the dvr responding to it. So if something flashes on screen, no chance to rewind and pause it to see what it was.
My standalone dvr responded instantly to remote control commands, and could FF and rewind as reliably and responsively as watching a video on your hard drive. It also included slow motion, frame advance, and picture zoom. On that dvr, if something flashed on the screen I’d just skip back 10 seconds, kick it into slow motion after around 5 seconds and then eventually pause it into frame advance to get exactly the frame I wanted to see.
For example, I used these features to transcribe some Survivor rules that flashed on the screen. Also to analyze a confusing helicopter crash during Chernobyl.
I’m almost certainly going to take a step backwards in terms of responsiveness and feature-rich controls like that no matter what solution I end up with. If I even do? Maybe our best bet is going to be to just drop down to basic cable and switch to mainly streaming. HBO Max is roughly the same price as HBO costs on our cable bill.
Speaking of HBO Max, does that include their current in-rotation movies list? For example, I think Birds of Prey and Charlie’s Angels are both currently in heavy rotation on the dozen or so HBO channels on my cable service. I typically go through the guide once a week and record around a dozen or so movies. (Around 50-60 a month, maybe?)
But if all those movies currently in rotation on cable HBO are also available on HBO Max, that’d be one super easy decision and partial solution all by itself.
As I mentioned above, there is a logistical issue with an antenna. We’re behind a pretty close and steep hill, so any antenna would need to be super tall to get any signal. The road is above our roof.
I don’t think that matters with satellite, though?
I think it was the Obama era FCC administrator who was pushing the cable companies to support cable cards, so people could provide their own cable boxes. Perhaps Google or Apple would make innovative ones. It sounded like a great idea. But given the streaming revolution, that seems less important now. So many people stream everything that if anything, traditional cable service is becoming irrelevant.
The OP mentioned subscribing to HBO, Showtime and Starz premium channels. I think all three offer streaming services as an alternative to traditional cable channels.
My only concern is that the vast majority of what I watch on those are the movies they show but didn’t produce. Are those available on their streaming counterparts?
Sling is basically using your high speed internet to relay programming to you. One shortcoming of sling: you don’t get a bunch of local channels, which is why I suggested it (plus if you can do that, it would be DVR-able). A guy at work says for locals, you can do this, which is “donation ware,” meaning they’ll bug you for a donation but it’s free.
That too comes over your internet. And another that I use is Pluto TV. It’s free—but you might hate it. Remember 1975, when you turned on the TV and you couldn’t pause, rewind, record—and the commercials played? That’s Pluto. I guess they had something allowing you to sort of tag a program and come back to it, but either they discontinued it or they’re improving it.
But what’s interesting is that some of the channels are aimed at binge watching. One, for instance, is “Deal or No Deal.” That is the channel. And it’s weird because they ought to show them in order so we know how it turned out (when a contestant’s coming back “next time,” don’t skip to a random next episode, eh?).
Because I downloaded the “app” for Pluto from amazon, I was looking at others that are in there. One reviewer said of another, similar app: “They go to commercial in mid-sentence. Actor starts talking and whoa! Five minutes later, we come back and they may show the sentence leading up to that and off it goes.”
Supposedly our TV (a Samsung) can take the feed from our computer (wirelessly) and project it. I’ve never managed to get it to work though and if it were as smart as it claims, we wouldn’t need a fire stick but there you go. Anyway if you send from the computer you might have the control you want.
I won’t ask you to check all of these titles, but to answer your question I went through a week’s worth of my 7 HBO channels (8 but only 7 fit in a guide page and the 8th was just a west coast feed) to see what movies I would have set to record as if the cable company gave me a replacement dvr today so everything was still normal.
With an eye toward filling up an empty DVR so I have plenty of choices of what to watch, I would have recorded the following through sometime Friday:
In Secret
Last Christmas
Tumbledown
Can You Keep a Secret?
The Way Back
JoJo Rabbit
Three to Tango
Birds of Prey (in theory; I actually watched it this past weekend)
Prometheus
An American Werewolf in London
But then the guide errored and closed, which my standalone’s guide never did. Multi-room is such an upgrade! So that’s 3 days worth of just HBO channels and I was already up to 9. Figure around 100 minutes each, that alone would be around 20% of the entirety of the multi-room DVR.
Just Birds of Prey would be sufficient to answer my question. That’s a current, major Hollywood movie in heavy rotation on the various HBO cable channels and it’s not an HBO movie or property. Is Birds of Prey on HBO Max right now?
And now, since I don’t have a DVR and there isn’t room on the whole house dvr, I will either record only In Secret (I’ll watch anything with Elizabeth Olsen) or more likely will just look for it in On Demand => HBO. It will likely be there so I don’t need to record it to a dvr at all.
I’ve also never seen Last Christmas, The Way Back, or Jojo Rabbit, but not dying to see any of those. The rest I’ve seen before at least once around the time they came out so it’s fine.
(Why yes, if you’re paying attention, I would watch the execrable Can You Keep A Secret? a second time. All I can say is Alexandra Daddario. I just rewatched San Andreas this weekend for the same reason.)
But then that has me rethinking using a DVR at all. I keep thinking I should sign up for the streaming versions of HBO, Showtime and Starz and scaling back down to just basic cable. Maybe I keep hulu for extra movies?
The problem for me with streaming services and movies is that I very quickly find myself left with “lower tier” movie quality only. With hulu, I happened to sign up for a month 3 weeks ago just to check out Devs, Castle Rock season 2, and a couple movies: The Andy Samberg Groundhog Day one and the Judy Greer killer dog one. All four of those were great.
Within around 2 weeks I had seen everything I wanted. Now at week 3 I have maybe 30 movies in hulu’s My Stuff and maybe 28 of them really look like hot garbage. Like it’ll be just barely good enough that I’ll watch it, but then regret wasting the time as soon as it’s over. They might possibly even be legit B movies, which is not my cup of tea at all.
Like, say what you will about Three to Tango, it was not a B movie. And it really doesn’t get more 90s than Matthew Perry and Neve Campbell. I saw it when it first went to cable 20 years ago, but not since. That woulda been some good nostalgia for the pre-9/11 world. I guess having a standalone dvr is rapidly becoming nostalgia as well.
You don’t have to keep the cable TV contract mentality with streaming services. You can subscribe and cancel streaming services whenever you like. If Hulu only has 1 month worth of content, just subscribe for a month and then switch to something else. And there’s no need to subscribe to 5 services at once if you’re only watching one of them. So maybe you watch Hulu this month, then HBO the next, then Starz the next, etc.
That’s what almost all the articles I found were like. See this quote from it:
I can’t use an antenna (hills) and I do have a cable subscription. I want to only record shows from cable, not the streaming services. (Though recording both to the same DVR with a ton of space would be my holy grail.)
Agreed. That’s what I’ve been doing. My first hulu month was last August so I could (and did) binge all of Handmaid’s Tale, including last season through the finale. Also Castle Rock (hated season 1) plus I watched a bunch of movies, and I think I even binged all of Life In Pieces just because. (Loved it while it was on network tv, was sad when it was cancelled.)
I cancelled hulu after 29 days, planning not to re-up until a month away from the next season of Handmaid’s Tale’s finale. But what with the virus and all that’s not likely to be soon. I figured devs and those two movies were enough justification so I did another Hulu August this year. But I’m already essentially out of hulu stuff to watch so will be happy to cancel next week before I get billed for a second month.