I have decided that I NEED Tivo. I also have DirecTV. Should I put out for the DirecTV TIVO box, or a straight TIVO box…
help.
Yes, you need Tivo.
I have Tivo but not DirecTV so can’t offer any advice, but I’m sure someone here can help.
Slightly related high jack. What is the TIVO monthly service charge for? The priviledge of using a hard drive that only records movies? My TV came with a built in Channel Guide (Guide Plus) so what are they trying to charge for?
I have a TiVo-esk system called ReplayTV. Mr Strand got it as a Christmas gift, and we love it. We also have DirecTV, mostly for the Hockey and Football packages they offer. I don’t think we would get the DirecTV/TiVo system even if we didn’t already have this one. We like to have flexibility.
Have you looked at the Replay systems? Sonic Blue is a spinoff of Panasonic, so it’s a reliable name. It’s cheaper than the TiVo, and the monthly fees are lower. The hard disc is smaller, but in over a year we’ve never filled ours.
The weird thing is that once you have one of these you can’t understand how folks live without one. I don’t watch that much TV but when I do, if I don’t understand dialog, I just rewind it. Phone call? Pause, and skip commercials when you go back. And you can’t beat watching football on it. Slo-mo, rewind, it’s great.
The monthly service charges are for their Channel guide system. You hit “guide”; cursor to the show you want, and hit “record”, once for a single record, twice for a record every week. When we got ours, there was no monthly fee, but now it’s $10.00. I don’t know if I would have bought out for $250.00, or not.
Guide Plus only goes out a day or two, IIRC. Tivo gives you 2 weeks of programming. Which gives you more flexibility in scheduling.
DirecTivo is better than stand-alone, because you can watch one thing while you tape another. And I think the monthly charge is quite a bit less ($3 vs. $13 but don’t quote me).
OldScratch!!! How the hell are ya?!
Wow, you’re entirely missing the point of TiVo. (Where did you get the idea it’s only for movies? LOL!) Without the service you can pretty much only buffer (pause/FF/REW) live TV as you watch it. WITH the service it finds/records/stores programming for you, allows you to search by genre, keywords, names, etc. It lets you rate programs with a thumb up/thumb down system so it’ll suggest stuff you might like that you didn’t know existed. You can set up a season pass for a show and it’ll track down and record it for you whereever TV execs decide to shuffle it around to, without you having to hunt for it.
As for the SA (stand alone) vs. DirecTivo I’m under the impression that the DirecTivo is cheaper than a standalone (if you plan to continue using Direct TV, obviously). Take the above link to the Tivo board to get the lowdown.
Would there be any difficulties getting it to work with digital cable? My big-ass cable box has a guide system in it that you can use to set reminders and buy pay per view, not sure how the TiVo would change it’s channels but I’m sure they’ve figured it out.
Holy crap, it’s oldscratch!
Dude, start a MPSIMS thread and let us know about new piercings!
directivo is $4.99 a month vs $12.95/month for the stand alone. You can get a lifetime sub for $249 until the end of Feb (goes up to $299) on a stand alone tivo box (no lifetime for directivo). Generally the best deals on directv with tivo are for new subscribers. I don’t have direct tv and pay the $12.95/month
Not all cable users have a channel guide. I dropped my digital cable once I had Tivo, so I would not otherwide have a guide. Its a product I that I couldn’t do without now that I have it. I would consider directivo the better option for you. Check out the Tivo Forum for more info. I’ve never used replay so I can’t speak from experience, but from others comments the tivo menus and search options are more powerful and user friendly.
It’s also my impression that with some directTV packages the Tivo service is free. The DTivo apparently has a bunch of advantages over the stand alones.(I have cable and a stand alone unit btw.) First off since the signal is digital to begin with it just copies it to the hard drive with no loss in quality.(The stand alones have to convert an analog stream to digital and then save it.) The one huge advantage of the DTivo is that it can record two separate channels at once. The stand alones can only record one channel at a time.
There is a little infrared thing that you put in front of the sensor on your cable box. When you change a channel with the TiVo remote, it sends a signal to the cable box.
I could not live without my TiVo. I’ve had it for a few years now and it’s just one of those things that makes life worth living.
I get so frustrated watching tv elsewhere… I’ll miss something and think “no problem, I’ll just rewind a little…D’oh!!” or I’ll need to answer the phone or pee or something and actually have to wait for a commercial… what is this, the stone age?
::Blink::
Oldscratch?
::Rub eyes::
Where ya been champ? Glad to see ya back!
As has been explained somewhat already, TiVo doesn’t just record stuff like a VCR. You can search its program guide for shows by name, by director, by actor, by genre, or even (using keywords) by specific episodes of a series. You then ask TiVo to record these things and they show up whenever they’re on – you don’t have to pay attention to schedules, channels, or anything like that. Plus, TiVo analyzes what you watch and it fills the empty space on the hard drive with shows it thinks you might enjoy. This is a fantastic feature (yes, yes, I know we were always at war with Eurasia) which has brought lots of things to my attention that I wouldn’t otherwise have known about but which are well worth watching. The monthly service charge is what allows TiVo to do all this because it not only populates the program guide, but it provides TiVo with information on genres, actors, directors, and other information which allow it to intelligently analyze what shows you haven’t asked it to record but which you might enjoy.
–Cliffy
But what if you fill up your hard drive? Can you delete programs once you’ve watched them? Can you copy them to a DVD or VHS? How much programming does it hold?
StG
To answer your last question first… it depends.
My Tivo is a 60 hour unit which means it (in theory) holds 60 hours of programming. However, Tivos can record at several different quality levels. The 60 hours is at lowest quality. At top quality I can only hold about 20 hours. I generally record stuff at one below the top setting (there are four quality levels) which gives me around 25 hours.
Yes, you can delete things after you watch them. In fact, when you finish watching something it has recorded it automatically pops up a dialog asking if you want to delete it. You can also go in at any time and review everything it has recorded and delete stuff at will.
One of the ways you set up things to record on Tivo is what they call a “Season Pass”. When you do, you tell it the maximum number of episodes you want to keep. Let’s say I’ve set up a season pass for 24 and have told it to keep 3 episodes. If it has three episodes saved and starts to record a fourth one, it will delete the oldest of the existing three before it starts.
Finally, if it wants to record something and has no space available, it will delete the oldest recording(s) it has automatically. (If you want to make sure something sticks around until you are able to watch it, you can also flag something as “do not erase” in which case it keeps it until you specifically delete it yourself.
As for VHS or DVD, there is a “Dump to VCR” option which allows you to record anything it has saved onto tape. I don’t know if it will work to a DVD recorder or not (I’ve never tried).
Tivo is seriously the best material thing I have ever received. IT ROCKS! We did the one time fee of $249.99 for the lifetime subscription - if you ever sell your TIVO (which you won’t do, because you will put it in your bedroom and then get a new one for the family room), the lifetime subscription is transferable.
I’m telling you - it’ll change your life, but beware - you’ll want one for every television in the house. :eek:
I don’t have a TVR yet, but after researching it a bit Replay TV seems like the way to go.
They are basically the same in most ways except for one huge point in Replay’s favor: Replay TV has a network jack on it. It will talk to your PC. So, buy the smallest size HD for the cheapest price, then save your TV shows to your computer.
TIVO has no such feature. To me, it seems pointless to be able to save tv shows if you can’t transfer them around your house from one tv to another PC, etc. YMMV.
Also, Replay TV has the button which automatically removes 95% of advertisments from shows. This has gotten them sued by lots of media companies, so they are a riskier operation then the more stable Tivo.
Actually, can a Replay TV owner chime in here?
I would like to hear how easy it is to say, save the entire season of my favorite show to a 160 Gig HD on my PC. Then I could just play that back to any TV that has a Replay TV hooked up to it, correct?
A co-worker of my husband’s hacked his TiVo box to put in a network connection.
We hacked ours to add a second hard drive. We have about 90 hours of space… but it never records suggestion things for us because it’s ALWAYS FULL!
Keep in mind that the Tivo lifetime subscription applies to the lifetime of the Tivo unit itself, not your lifetime. It stays with the unit. If you upgrade to a newer Tivo, you have to buy a lifetime subscription for that, too (or get the monthly service). If you sell your old Tivo, your $249 (soon to be $299) lifetime subscription goes with it.
Incidentally, I couldn’t go back to watching TV the old way ever again. “What do you mean I have to be home at a particular time just to see a TV show? What’s that all about?”