I prefer a Roku box with Netflix and Hulu Plus subscriptions!
I have had TiVo, and DVRs through DirecTV, Time Warner, and U-Verse. TiVo blows them all out of the water, and here’s why:
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Ease of use. TiVo is smooth, never laggy, and it’s easy to find everything you need. All the others are interfaced within 8 other menus for all of the other cable services, and it’s hard to get to what you want. And OH GOD THE LAG. I have to hit buttons about 8 times to get them to do what I want. A simple scroll through the list of recorded programs is a chore. Not on TiVo.
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Streaming. On TiVo, I can stream stuff wirelessly from our computer onto our TV. Anything. Works like a charm. Of the three others I’ve tried, only DirecTV offered this, and even then only some of the files actually worked. We still have a TiVo even though it doesn’t work with U-Verse, just for this feature.
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The features aren’t as good. This is really a distant third, as the “TiVO suggestions” has been turned off on ours for years because it kept recording crap and bumping off stuff I actually wanted to watch. But the wishlists are great–we’re going through a kitchen remodel soon, and I want to watch remodeling shows. On my current DVR, I search for kitchen, and I get only shows that have kitchen in the title. If I were using the TiVo, I’d set up a keyword search for kitchen and find a lot more.
We’ve had 4 TiVos, 2 retired series 2s and currently an HD and a Premiere. The interface hasn’t changed greatly since our older units, but that’s a good thing. The best thing about the TiVo interface is the speed. I’ve tried Verizon’s DVR and the response to input is hideous, it takes forever to move the cursor. Same is true for the Motorola set-top boxes that Comcast uses, their on-demand is a royal pain in the ass to navigate.
The Verizon DVR is also very unreliable, or at least it was when I had it (briefly) a couple years ago. Freezing, failing to record stuff, just couldn’t count on it. My wife would always ask me why the DVR didn’t do something or other. Being an engineer, I HATE being asked a question I can’t answer. We were both thrilled when I bought her a TiVo HD to replace the Verizon box, which replaced her beloved Series 2. End of problem.
That said, my Premiere is pretty de-contented physically - no way to interface a set-top box, must use cablecards, no S-Video out, it’s built to a price, not a standard. Not a big fan of the proprietary WiFi adapter either, but I skipped that and had the house wired for all the TiVos to connect directly back to the router, and it works rather nicely. Tivo Desktop Plus is a great way to move stuff on and off the TiVos, especially with a hardwired network. It’s a good value at $30.
If I had to drop Tivo, my friends had the Dish DVR, it’s pretty nice. Good GUI, gobs of HD storage,
I had TiVo for years, then a Comcast DVR, now DirecTv.
TiVo was the best. Comcast’s was God-awful.
DirecTV’s is almost as good as TiVo. Really the only thing it doesn’t do is track your likes/dislikes and make recommendations to you based on those, or record things you might like but didn’t schedule.
A friend of mine got Uverse and they like the feature that they can record a show in one room and watch them in another.
I use Windows Media Center to record shows and if I want to save them, I like being able to edit out the commercials and save them in DVD quality in Windows Movie Maker to reduce the disk space. I’m using Windows Vista. I don’t know if that works on Windows 7.
I’ve had the exact same experience.
When DirecTV had DirecTivo boxes, those were the bomb. I’ve heard that they’re coming out with them again this or next year (I don’t have a cite)
Yes, things have gotten much better. I had a Tivo 1, and a DirecTivo series 2 and they were both great. Having used my in-law’s old Motorola/Comcast DVR and my brothers older DirecTV HD not-Tivo DVR I would have gone with the Tivo every time. The Motorola/Comcast thing was a disaster, and is not worth speaking of. The older DirecTV HD DVR was mostly OK, but it had lots of deal killer problems. A user interface can be gotten used to, as long as it’s not completely broken, and that one wasn’t. What was broken was the stability. It would routinely miss shows, drop season passes for no reason, crash, eat recorded shows, etc. All of that on multiple different hardware units, so it wasn’t just one flaky box.
I now have a newer DirecTV not-Tivo HD DVR, and it’s fine. I haven’t had any crashes or disappearing season passes. I miss the Tivo recommendations, and the interface is a bit clunkier than the Tivo. The big thing that made it ok for me to get it after 10 years of Tivo was that the Tivo interface isn’t as good as the old Tivo interface. The in-laws have one of the series 4 HD cable ones (or whatever the latest model is, XL or something), and it’s not nearly as pleasant to use as my older Series 1 and 2 tivos. My complaints about the XL are a mostly the laggy and annoying interface, which is also my complaint about the DirecTV HD DVR I’ve got.
I’d still say the Tivo XL is a bit better than the DirecTV HD box, but not nearly enough better to be worth the extra cost of Tivo+cable vs satellite. For me the price difference was something like $30/month for the first year, and then $10/month after that. My recommendation is to go with whatever’s cheapest, and isn’t total junk.
The new DirecTivo box must be based on nuclear fusion, because it’s been coming out in 6-12 months for the last few years.
I can tell you that the PVR’s from Shaw Cable (in Canada) are absolute SHIT compared to Tivo. However, HD Tivos aren’t available in Canada, so I had to make the switch when I got HD.
I miss my Tivo. I had an original Tivo. Despite all of the “advances” there’s still nothing quite as good for a pure DVR. I wish they made one that worked with Dish and the simple Sling adapter.
Dish DVR works, but c’mon, the interface still friggin’ sucks. I limped along with MythTV for years and years, but only as a backend, because the interface sucked. It’s now 2011, and no one can make set top boxes as nice as Tivo. Apple, where are you?
Tivo and ReplayTV patented all the good ideas and every other box has to work around those patents.
I’ve got a pair of DirecTivos that I no longer use as we dropped DirecTV, and three ReplayTVs. I’ve expanded them and have the DVArchive software that lets me extract programs. The best thing about Replay was the things that killed it - the ability to automatically skip commercials. Hollywood had to kill that dead. I have them all networked, and have been able to start watching a show in one room and finish watching it it in another.
I wish I had an HD one. Failing that, I wish Plex would work with a tuner. That is some nice interface design.
I don’t like tivo. Sure, the interface is slick but $20 a month is a bit steep, and you have to deal with the cable company coming out an installing a cablecard which may or may not work, and you’ll probably lose on-demand channels.
A lot of the downsides with tivo are the cable company’s fault, not tivo’s, but they are real nonetheless. If you want an easy life, stick with the cable company dvr.
I don’t have cable or satellite. My DVR is superior to TIVO because it’s all free.
TiVo is definitely the standard setter. There are a bunch of things my cable DVR does just as well, some it can do but in an annoying crappy way, and some it can’t do at all. They do seem to be adding functions over time. For example, I can control all the cable boxes in my house from my iPod now, and watch live tv or on demand stuff on it.
For people who only care about certain functions, it might well effectively “all be the same thing”.
What do you have? If you have an HTPC that’s hardly free.
pdts
I like TiVo better because for me, the menus are much cleaner and easier to see. I really hate the print on top of the TV screen menus of the cable provider’s DVRs. It’s REALLY hard to see for me. Way too busy and all crowded on the screen. My sister on the other hand, thinks it’s way better because you don’t have to drill down through different menus.
To be fair, the only other DVRs I’ve seen other than my TiVo is GCI’s (the local cable provider in Anchorage), and one in a tiny town in TX (don’t remember the provider’s name though) .
PS…I’ve had TiVo for around 6 years now (best of my memory) and no matter when/if I upgrade my box, the cost of service is still the same as my first box. Around 12.95 a month.
Tivo? DVR’s? Hmmmmmmmmm.
Might be time to upgrade from my Sony Betamax!
Free over the air TV.
How many channels can TiVo record at a time? Comcast, when I had it a few years ago, could only do two, and if you were watching TV at the time, you had to switch to one of the recording channels or cancel a recording.
AT&T UVerse lets you record 4 at a time and I’m pretty sure you can watch an entirely different channel if you have 4 recordings going on at once. Plus it automatically builds in a few extra minutes at the start and end of each recording.
My TiVo can do two channels, and I still have the cable box so I can watch a third live if necessary. I can’t recall ever needing more than that, but YMMV. It looks like they have a 4-tuner model available now.
For me TiVo’s biggest advantage is the interface; it’s probably the most intuitive electronic device I’ve ever used. (My wife thinks so too, and believe me, that’s saying a lot.)