What can people tell me about these two products? I’ve heard that the picture degrades noticably when put on the extended setting. I’ve also heard something about the cheaper ones not being able to hold more than seven episodes. Does that mean that it (which ever that one is) can’t recognize more than seven titles at a time?
Anyone got one, to tell the advantages and drawbacks of these?
Well, I have a Tivo (I’m not sure what Showstopper is, I’m guessing it’s another manufacturer’s vesrsion of ReplayTV), and I can tell you a bit about it. Tivo is like ReplayTV, although the fee structure is a bit different.
Tivo units are available in:
15 hours (discontinued)
20 hours (discontinued)
30 hours
60 hours
That means they hold that many hours worth of programming at the lowest (basic) quality level. As you increase quality, obviously the amount of potential recording time is decreased. Unfortunately, since all these units use fixed bitrate recording, no matter what you’re recording it still takes up the same amount of space. So, for example, a recording of a debate, which would compress fairly well using a variable bitrate because there’s not much movement, takes up just as much space as a recording of an action movie or a football game, where there is lots of movement. However, you can take into account what type of programming you’re recording and choose the quality accordingly. I use normal mode (one up from basic) for most things because for most of the stuff I time shift picture quality really isn’t that critical. However, I found basic quality unbearable - digital artifacts whenever there’s any motion at all. For movies or programs that I plan on archiving to video tape, I use a higher setting.
As shows age, the Tivo deletes them to make room for newer shows. You can mark shows to be kept forever, or until a specific date. Also, as you watch them you have the option of deleting or saving them.
The purchase price of the Tivo does not include the subscription, which is $10 a month or $200 lifetime (transferable to a different user if you sell it, but not to a different unit, unless it’s exchanged under warranty). The idea of the subscription is that it will find shows even if their time changes (there are other advantages as well). You can use it without the subscription but you’ll have to program it like a VCR (i.e. give every program you want to watch start and end times). There’s a $100 rebate that’s valid until the end of this year, good if you buy the lifetime subscription. The ReplayTV’s purchase price includes the program guide. The program guide is downloaded via a local phone number a couple of times a week; it happens in the middle of the night and is intelligent enough to check the phone line to ensure that it’s free before dialing.
I love this thing; one of my favorite features is the ability to come into a program that’s been recording for 15 minutes or so and still start watching from the very beginning, while it’s still being recorded. Another great feature is that it gives you a listing of every show it currently has stored, so you don’t have to watch them sequentially (like a VCR with time shifting), and you don’t need to swap tapes. And there’s no limit (except for disk space) to the number of programs you can record. It also has the feature (which I don’t use) of finding shows that are similar to the ones that you already record; it has thumbs up/thumbs down buttons on the remote to let the Tivo know if you like the shows it picked for you. This feature can be disabled. If you use it, the shows that Tivo picks are deleted first, so you don’t need to worry about it using up disk space on shows you don’t plan on watching.
A couple of disadvantages are the price (although there are a lot of discounts, mine ended up costing over $500, explained below), and the fact that if you want to archive a bunch of shows to tape (say, all of your Simpsons episodes) you have to do it one show at a time. There’s no way to tell it to run one show after another - at the end of each show it always brings you back to the main menu. This, unfortunately, is not fixed in software version 2.0, which is due out early next year (the new software is automatically downloaded to the machine when it becomes available). There’s also no commercial advance (it does have 3 speeds of fast forward), which I believe ReplayTV may have (or at least an automatic 1 minute skip).
These units use the IBM/Motorola PowerPC architecture and run a modified form of Linux. This means that they are very hackable. The only hack that I’ve done (and the one that’s the most popular) is to install a second hard drive (i used a 60GB IDE, but you can go up to 80GB, the maximum currently available) which increased my capacity to 100 hours from 30. This cost less than purchasing a new 60 hour unit. However, it still ended up to be fairly expensive:
Tivo unit - about $230 from Mercata.com, after discount
Subscription: $200
Add’l hard drive $200
Rebate -$100
Total $530
For more information, the best place to go would be to the Tivo forum: http://www.avsforum.com/ubbcgitivo/Ultimate.cgi
There’s also a ReplayTV/Showstopper Forum, that you can get to from here. I’d say judging by the number of posts, the Tivo is a lot more popular (4 times as many). There’s also a much larger hacking community dedicated towards it.
If you have DirectTV, there’s also a product called DirecTivo, which will record digitally directly off the satellite (it replaces the satellite box). You can get more info on the Tivo products at http://www.tivo.com/
Hope this helps.
Let me just add that I have a TiVo, and I will never go back to TV the old way!
Can’t comment on Showstopper (?), but a friend of mine has ReplayTV. When he first got it, it sure seemed cool; it made his TV-viewing habits a lot easier to manage. (Especially when he was out of town; no more 6-hour maximum on the tape, no more futzing with cable converter boxes to record shows on different channels, etc.)
However, now that he’s had it a couple of months, it’s showing a few bugs. In particular, now that the hard drive is more than 80% full (he records more than he watches, as is probably to be expected), there are lots of problems with frame dropout, skipping, and other stuff.
In fact, just Wednesday, I was over to watch the “Junkyard Wars” marathon on his huge TV. We started watching in real time, then paused playback (while recording continued) so we could go look something up on the web. We kept doing this on commercials, to deal with the pizza delivery guy, etc. – all great advantages of the system. But then, midway through the second hour (which was being recorded as a separate “file,” because the schedule shows them as three separate entries), we noticed a lot more dropouts and errors occurring. And at the 45-minute mark, the system completely froze. It was hung so bad we had to unplug it and completely reboot. We missed a couple of minutes of the show in the process. When we started it back up, it was smart enough to resume recording the interrupted show, but as a new file; the first portion, prior to the crash, was now a null record, with barely a second of video captured.
What’s worse, we had to do the reboot about ten minutes into the third hour. The dropouts and errors got worse and worse as we finished the second show and moved on to the third, and it was then that we discovered that the reboot had also killed the third file, making the ten minutes up to that point another null record. We therefore joined that portion late, but the errors kept increasing, and we had another hang, about five minutes before the real-time end of the show but only 20 minutes into our viewing, which meant we’d lost more than half an hour of it. Too bad, because I really wanted to see which of those funky machines actually made it across the ravine. (Don’t tell me who wins, by the way. I know I could look it up, but I recorded the show on regular videotape at home and I plan to watch it tomorrow.)
When we realized we were having problems, we tried to alleviate the drive-space issue by deleting some of the other files – shows that were recorded and that he’d watched or decided he didn’t need – in an effort to give the machine some breathing room. It didn’t work, obviously.
So either we were doing something stupid (which is unlikely; we’re both pretty tech-savvy), or ReplayTV has some oddball system problems that show up when the drive starts getting filled. The concept is great, and it seemed to work like magic at first, but it’s been quite temperamental lately. I don’t know how the machine manages its files; if it could be hooked to a PC, I’d suggest trying a “defrag” to see if that helps.
At any rate, that’s our real-world experience from a couple of days ago. Hope the information is useful.
Thanks for the info. Has anyone out there added another drive to a Replay TV box? I’d just buy one on ebay then at the cheapest possible price and add a drive if it’s possible.
I don’t know that it’s reasonably possible. The ReplayTV boxes are 100% proprietary – they don’t want you poking around the guts of it.
The TiVo, on the other hand, is a Linux box built of off the shelf parts (more or less). There’s even a serial port you can enable to remotely access your command shell!
Because the TiVo’s OS is essentially a variant of Linux for the PowerPC processor, all the geeks have already done the work and provided ample instruction in expanding the TiVo. Check out http://tivohack.sourceforge.net for the details.
I’ve had a TiVo since September and just love it. I have never had it lockup, freeze or crash on me. I have basic cable + hbo and do not use a decoder box with my cable. I record everything on medium quality except for action films where I use the next one up in quality because they can be pixelated. I had a 14 hour model which I have upgraded myself it now does 117 hours in basic and 75 hours in medium quality. I find it hard to go back to just a VCR or VCR & TV
See http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/Forum13/HTML/002315.html
But just out of curiousity, when everyone’s singing praises about TiVo, why are you so gung-ho about ReplayTV?
I keep asking about RePlay because as I understand it, this box and the ShowStopper don’t require the paid subscription to the show listings. I assume it comes with the purchase. I suppose that if I buy a Tivo on ebay, I should ask if it has already been given a lifetime subscription to the service.
When I bought my TiVo almost two months ago, I compared it with the Replay TV thusly:
Tivo: $419 (box) + 200 (lifetime subscription) - (100) (rebate)
Replay: 599 (includes lifetime subscription) - (100) (rebate)
(both of these the 30-hour models)
Okay, so the TiVo’s twenty bucks more, but I bought it anyway. Why? It’s a Linux box with a fairly open design, opening up the possibilities to enhance it myself.
You’re actually probably better off not buying a TiVo with an already-paid subscription – you don’t know that the seller isn’t lying to you about that detail.
That’s true about anything you buy off ebay. You can easily check the status of the subscription from the TiVo system information screen.
If you have any plans to expand the disk space of your DVR (HDR? What’s the standard TLA for these things?), I believe TiVo is still your best bet, even though the initial expense may be higher.