DVR

TiVo, Lower the Price on Your HD-DVR!

September 28, 2006 by Jim Connelly

When I made the decision to be a DVR early adopter, I chose Replay-TV over TiVo. It’s just that I thought that the Replay was slightly better for the money. It wasn’t a Mac vs. PC decision: I wasn’t taking sides in some great cultural war or anything. At the time, if you said that you were getting a DVR, people had no idea what you were talking about, anyways.

Meanwhile, a lot of other people got TiVo, and fell in love with its easy-to-use interface, and its iconic boo-bop noise, so it became the verb, even while teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. I bought a second Replay — the one with the infamous commercial skip — just a couple of years prior to the company being sold, and being sold again. Now, it’s essentially a software company, and good luck to them — rarely does a technology change my life the way theirs did — but their PC Edition doesn’t fit what I need right now, what with my HD TV and everything.

What does fit, it looks like, is this new TiVo Series 3 with the HD. There is, however, a problem. There is always a problem.

ABC: Always Being Clueless

July 12, 2006 by Jim Connelly

ABC, the network that has been at war with DVR owners for the past several yearrs may be going nuclear. According to at least one report, they are in talks with cable & satellite companies to disable the fast-forward button on future DVRs. Somehow, I doubt this is one of the features that Kirk had in mind when he wrote about his ideal DVR.

Even better, they claim that consumers will be OK with this, that people don’t actually want to fast-forward through the commercials. That the only reason they use DVRs is for the time-shifting aspects. And that we’d all be willing to put up with commercials to continue to time-shift, so there would be no backlash whatsoever.

Holy Jesus Frack! Do these people even use DVRs? There are so many things wrong with this, I don’t even know where to begin.

The Perfect DVR – My Wish List For the Ultimate Television Machine

July 11, 2006 by Kirk Biglione

I’ve owned a TiVo for over five years now, and without question it has completely changed the way I watch television. I won’t elaborate on how revolutionary the TiVo has been because Kassia has already done that, and I don’t want to come across as one of those TiVo zealots. No, I’m not here to tell you how great the TiVo is. Instead, I want to note just how disappointed I am by the current state of DVR technology. It seems to me that the rate of DVR innovation has begun stagnating.

Is The Virtual DVR A “Real” DVR?

June 8, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Is a networked storage device an actual storage device? Does it still count as “your” storage if there isn’t a physical box in your home?

These are the questions that may be decided — at least for the DVR — by the suits and countersuits surrounding Cablevision’s decision to create a network DVR. This functionality will allow users to record and save programs on their servers, as opposed to the current model of storing the programs on various TiVo-ish devices.

A veritible who’s who of heavyweight content providers are up in arms — they feel that the simple fact that there is no physical box for file storage means that this service is akin to “Video on Demand,” and therefore violates their sacrosanct copyrights.

TiVo’s Dual Tuner: Only Halfway There

April 26, 2006 by Jim Connelly

My heart jumped when I saw the headline: TiVo Introduces Dual Tuner DVR. While I’ve always been a ReplayTV person, I recently jumped ship to a cable-company provided Scientific Atlanta DVR where the total lack of an usuable user interface has nearly obliterated the fact that it has a dual tuner and can record HD programs.

In retrospect, it was a dumb-ass move, but I’m addicted to those beautiful HD broadcasts of The Sopranos and 24. So, if TiVo was introducing a dual-tuner standalone product (they already make one bundled with DirecTV), I was on board: maybe someone else won’t make the same mistake that I did. Then I read a few more stories about it. And: sigh.

HD DVR: Hi Definition Disappointment Part 2

March 9, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Recently, I wrote about how disappointed I was with my first cable company-supplied Hi-Definition DVR. My main issues were that, compared to the Replay I had been using for several years, the actual functionality and usability were a huge step downwards. In addition, the cable guy kept going on about how it just too bad that I wasn’t getting something called the “Moxi,” which he said was much better.

And he was right: after being contacted by a guy from the company that made the Moxi, I did some research, and, yup, it pretty much has all of the features I want. Fat lot of good that does me. After all, it’s not like its easy to find a day to unhook everything, wait for another cable guy; rebuild my entire setup, and learn yet another DVR.

Meanwhile, I’ve discovered even more issues with the Scientific Atlanta box:

Nowhere does the cable guide tell you whether an episode of show is a repeat or a first-run episode.
If a show I’m normally recording is being pre-empted by another show, the cable guide still shows that the timeslot is going to be recorded.
For the NBC HD Channels, the sound doesn’t sync up with the picture. The Olympics were on when I wrote that first post, so I had no cause to record any NBC shows, but since then, it gets very annoying when sound gags on Scrubs don’t match the visuals. Or this upcoming weekend when Arctic Monkeys play SNL. It’s only NBC HD — nobody else — so I don’t know if the problem is with the cable box, Charter, our local affiliate, or NBC itself. All I know is that it’s dammed annoying.
Finally, despite all of this, our cable bill has risen $20 (twice as much as they told me it would) and — best of all there is a line item on the bill for DVR Moxi Service. That’s right: it looks like I’m being charged for the thing that I didn’t even get.

So I’m thinking that rather than upgrading to the Moxi, if we’re going to make that much effort, we might as well switch to the satellite company that has the TiVo HD DVR.