The suggestions feature is the reason TiVo is worth the price. It’s certainly easier to use than your cable company DVR, but it fills up your buffer with stuff it thinks you’ll like, and while that isn’t perfect (especially if your fatehr-in-law visits a couple times each year and fucks with your settings), it never bumps something you asked it to record for something it chose for you. That is, it fills up empty space, but it doesn’t ever take up any space, because it will always delete suggestions before kicking off even your oldest requested shows.
I have both a TiVo and a cable company DVR which I don’t pay for b/c of a Comcast screw-up. The cable DVR is in HD; my TiVo (being pretty old) is SD, and because of the way the older models were set up, it can record at most one cable channel and one broadcast channel, while the other DVR can record two cable channels. (N.B. Again, this is because I’ve got an ancient model – for years now they’ve been able to dual-tune two cable channels.)
Even with all those drawbacks, I still use the TiVo almost exclusively unless I absolutely have to record two cable shows at the same time. That’s because the TiVo is so much easier to use.
As for cost, the monthly subscription isn’t that much given that your cable company will charge you a similar monthly amount for their DVR.
Whatever you do, don’t do the monthy subscription, do the “lifetime” one. Aka you never have to pay a monthly fee again.
You want a duel tuner, not a dual screen. Duel tuners = record two shows at the same time. You may not thing you’ll need it, but you definitely will.
Don’t bother with a cable company DVR. They are buggy, crappy and pricey ($15 round here, probably up to $18/month now).
If price is a concern and you don’t need HD recording, I’d get one off of Ebay with a lifetime subscription. Once I"m settled in my new house it’s what I’m doing; I’ve been meaning to get it but I keep saying “why move another thing?”
TIVO is the clearly superior DVR, but whatever DVR comes standard with your service might “do”. But if you have the extra cash, Tivo brand Tivo is worth it.
Exactly. Evil Captor, you say your wife wants to record 5 shows a week. If this is truly all you’re ever going to use it for, the cheapest option available from your cable company will surely be sufficient.
But, if you’re like me, once you have the TiVo and start discovering what it can do, you’ll wonder what you ever did without it. I love, love, love it and I’ll never go back.
It isn’t cheap, but with the lifetime subscription it’s a one-time splurge. If you decide to take the plunge, it’s done, bought and paid for, for good.
Unfortunately, Comcast canceled that project a while ago. They did a trial run in the Boston area, then decided that they didn’t want to go nationwide. Only the powers-that-be at Comcast know why.
Really? Are you sure? Because theselinks (the latter dating from May 2011), indicate that they finally made it available. As I understand it, you buy a Tivo Premiere box and then don’t need to pay the monthly Tivo fee.
Actually that’s only true for analog recordings. If the channel you’re recording is digital you don’t get an option for image quality. (It just makes a copy of the digital stream to the had drive as is.)
Basically the deal with the Tivo can be understand by asking the question “You’ve got a VCR, why don’t you timeshift everything?” Pretty much every reason you can think of that you don’t time shift everything the Tivo answers very well. (So you end up time shifting everything.) Really it was so easy my late technophobe mom loved the thing. (I guess the one big thing is it let her watch Leno. She couldn’t watch it when it was on because she was too tired at night because she was dying of ALS. It gave her a little bit of happiness at the end of her life in a miserable situation.)