Tivo anyone?

[Billy]

My telly blew up the other day (picture collapsed, fizzing sound, smoke, the works!) which meant I had to go buy another or miss United v Bayer.

Anyway, to the point. I also got a TiVo "Personal video recorder". For those of you who don't know, it's basically a hard drive recorder and modem kind of affair. Stuff the explaining, go to www.uk.tivo.com and read it yourselves.

Does anyone else have one? What do you reckon? I'm not one for buying new technology (well, new application really, but you know what I mean) but it was only £100 with the telly (£230ish on its own), and it is damned handy compared to a VCR (which was built into the dead telly, by the way :( )

Or am I a mug, and it will be useless in a couple of years?

[Jezz_S13]

MMmm seems it's just you Billy. :)

Does it work?

[Billy]

Ooh, I feel all techy and cutting edge now! :p

Yeah, it works. My only complaint is that it doesn't account for timing changes, though given the automatic upgrade facility (which has happened once already!) it may well be able to do that too soon....

[Branners]

Mate of mine has the Tivo and he loves it. The fact that it learns the sort of programmes you watch and then tries to record them for you is great.

JB

www.mkivsupra.net

[NickJM]

I've got one Billy, they are fantastic!! Don't wanna sound like I work for the company but they really do change the way you watch telly.

And you can set Tivo to bung a few minutes onto the end of recordings so they don't get cut off (v. annoying).

[Nick_Walczak]

I want a VCR that has internal hard disk and doesnt rely on tapes with all the advantages that brings but I don't care about the other guff and don't want to pay a monthly subscription. I looked at the Tivo but discounted it because it doesn't have it's own tuner so you cant record one program and watch another which is just nonsense. Ideally, I'd have one with more than one tuner so you could watch one prog via your telly and record up to two other stations simultaneously.

[Billy]

Originally posted by Nick_Walczak
I want a VCR that has internal hard disk and doesnt rely on tapes with all the advantages that brings but I don't care about the other guff and don't want to pay a monthly subscription. I looked at the Tivo but discounted it because it doesn't have it's own tuner so you cant record one program and watch another which is just nonsense. Ideally, I'd have one with more than one tuner so you could watch one prog via your telly and record up to two other stations simultaneously.

Except that it does have it's own tuner and you can watch other progs while recording! I do it all the time.
As far as I can tell the subs pay for the prog info bit, but otherwise it's just a normal(ish) vid.
To be perfectly honest I wasn't intending subscribing but the sneaky buggers give you a week free, and when it ran out I found out just how useful it is! Forget teletext, this tells you what's on any channel on any day straight away, and you just click on what you want. The basic quality (which degrades the pic less than the weather does up here) gives 40 hours of vid, which is enough for a week, and you can dump stuff onto tape with another click if needs be.

What does excite me (not a lot, but) is the fact that all the ratings you register are collected, which is a bit Big Brother in one way but hopefully will trickle back to the TV companies, with the result that there will be more of what people actually like. That could be a double edged sword though, given the general publics utter lack of taste and discernment......

....and no, I don't work for them either!

[Nick_Walczak]

Ah, it's been a while since I investigated but they either didn't used to have them or I was misinformed... :o

Can you record a program and start watching it before it's finished? I assume you can because of the 'pause live TV' function.

[Billy]

Originally posted by Nick_Walczak

Can you record a program and start watching it before it's finished? I assume you can because of the 'pause live TV' function.

Yeah, but that may not be available without the subscription. I remember reading something like that in the manual, though I may be talking bollards.

It just records what you're watching (until you change channels) so you can watch half a prog then decide to record it (as long as it's been on for under 30 minutes, I think) and you don't actually watch any live TV as you're always watching the recording complete with 1/2 sec delay!

[Kev]

Did a fair bit of investigation into them when they came out a couple of years ago as i was in the tv +vcr industry and had to keep up with developments.

To be honest i couldnt find anything to fault them, picture reproduction quality was far superior to VHS and recording time was much better.

As Nick said, originally they did only record what u were watching but they have obviously sorted that out.

The only thing that worried me was that it was originally launched in the USA and it failed to get even 1 million subscribers.

Didnt want to be left with a £200 useless box.

But 1. they have obviously reduced the price
2. they are still going.

Makes u wonder why they havent got a big ad campaign goin though.

Kev

[adheyes]

Get on over to the UK area (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=26) of the TiVo Community Forum (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/) and you should be able to answer all your questions.

People have been doing drive upgrades, wired and wireless Ethernet cards, remote control over the internet etc.

If you don't read anything else, make sure you read the article contained on this page (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=37326)

You can now buy them new for between £199 - £239. Like Sky+ you pay £10/month subscription for TV guide data, telephone support and software updates.

[andyf]

I chose to get Sky + over TiVo and it's a good buy. I suspect TiVo would be great if I were on cable or something though.

[piglet]

It's got to be the next best thing to Sky+, but thats just my opinion. How the devil are you by the way?