I’m faced with yet another holiday purchase for impossible people. Unlike previous years, I think I have an inspired idea.
The family - three adults - lives on wildly different schedules and, more importantly, vastly different television watching tastes. The resulting clashes over control of the remote are often ugly. So, I’m thinking TiVo, or some type of DVR through their cable provier (Comcast).
So, question #1: If you knew then what you knew now, which service would you go with, and what equipment would you recommend? Ease of use is going to be paramount - they are not techo-savvy and I don’t want to be asked to drop everything on a regular basis to enable them to record a show. Bad enough I get a phone call every time their computer displays a pop-up they don’t understand (which is to say, all of them)
I’d definitely like the equipment to be capable of recording broadcasts onto a DVD if a show justifies it, but I don’t believe that would be often, and I don’t currently think we’d need more than a few days’ storage capacity - but if there’s a chorus of “Trust me, you’ll need more storage than you planned for”, I’ll revise that thinking.
My biggest concern is that the television, DVD player, and VCR that are currently hooked up in a complicated tangle of wires are all old, and often resentful of change. Howdifficult is it likely to be for me, who has no trouble with computers but a troubled history with televisions and associated paraphenalia, to hook up the new equipment and still have verything running properly? Would I be better off paying a professional to come in and install it - and is that even an option with TiVO? Even a day’s outage on the cable or DVD player will turn an inspired gift into a quagmire of hurt feelings. Those medications my mom’s on are not enhancing rational thinking and emotional control…
I had to be talked into getting TiVo by my computer engineer brother, and you guessed it, now it’s one of those things I can’t imagine living without. Some tips:
• Yes, you will want more storage space than you might initially think. Get at least 80 hours. That 80 hours is if you record at the lowest quality level. At the highest quality level (which is really just equal to what you see on live TV), the recording capacity drops to about 27 hours. With several people working the TiVo, the hours per person drop even more.
• You probably know that you must subscribe to the TiVo programming service for the hardware to work. If you plan to keep your particular TiVo model more than 2 1/2 years, get a “lifetime” subscription (currently $299), instead of a monthly subscription ($12.95). By the way, “lifetime” means for the life of the hardware, not your life.
• The TiVo website has good Getting Started guides, with clear schematics showing how you would configure the wiring using different combinations of hardware you may have (VCR, television, cable box, etc.).
• And yes, you CAN record one channel while watching another! The TiVo customer support pages tell you several options on how to set that up.
• Really cool tip: If you have cable Internet service, you can set up your TiVo so that you can program your TiVo remotely. Say you’re away from home, and you hear about something good on TV that you want to record. Just log in to your TiVo account at the TiVo website, and you can set up your TiVo to record the program, even if it’s as little as an hour before the program starts. Try to get a VCR to do that!
• Worried that different people setting up their own recordings will conflict with other people’s recording pre-sets? The TiVo will tell you if a recording you are setting up will conflict with a previously set recording, and ask which you want to do.
Walloon gave some pretty solid advice - but I just wanted to comment on hooking up the Tivo.
Hooking up a Tivo is not vastly different from hooking up a VCR or a DVD player or a cable box. However, there can be some trickiness getting the cable box to change channels properly. If you are not using a cable box, then no problem. But if you are, then you will have to configure the Tivo to control the cable box. This requires the use of control cables either through the back of the cable box (direct control) or through a neat little cable that controls your cable box via Infrared. Then you have to tell the Tivo how to control the box. The point is that this part can get tricky.
Trust me - you ARE definately smart enough to hook up the Tivo and your friends/family are smart enough to use it. But, when hooking it up, I would recommend extreme patience coupled with a TV-savvy friend if possible.
Also, you probably already know this, but just in case - you do have to have your Tivo hooked up to a connection of some sort to get the listings and your cable tv line does not count. You can either hook it up through cable internet (which was a bit of a pain in the ass for me to get it started and find the right USB adaptors) or through your phone line. If you hook it up through your phone line, you don’t have to worry about it blocking the line - it makes one phone call a day, usually around 2 or 3 am and it only stays on for a few minutes to download the schedule.
Really, though, I like having it hooked up through the internet better. Assuming you can get through the pain in the ass set-up, it’s all good.
I’m very happy with the DVR provided by Comcast, especially since it’s integrated with the cable box, so recording anything, including digital cable channels, is easy. I was concerned that it would be difficult to get the Tivo box to change channels on the cable box, and I didn’t want to pay twice; once for digital cable and again for the Tivo subscription.
Not to knock Dewey’s comments, but I have had an entirely different experience re: other DVRs.
I’ve had two other cable box/DVR’s - one from Time Warner and one from … er … SBC or something like that. I’ve found both to be much less intuitive than Tivo - i.e. harder to set up recordings, harder to set up recurring recordings, and less control overall.
OTOH, I’ve had friends who enjoyed their cable box DVR (and never bought or used Tivo). Also I’ve had friends who used computer based DVRs and swore by those.
Ultimately, I think it’s a judgment call. I have used 3 DVRs - 1 Tivo and 2 Cable and the bottom line is that the Tivo is the “best” DVR in my opinion.