On buying TiVo . . .

[Grisgra]

Clearly, I'm an idiot for not having purchased it already. Seems like there are a few options available . . . any tips from you folks on where I can get it for cheapest/what the best route is?

[Sponger15SB]

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Clearly, I'm an idiot for not having purchased it already. Seems like there are a few options available . . . any tips from you folks on where I can get it for cheapest/what the best route is?

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If you have digital cable you might be able to get a combo box with your company for a couple extra bucks a month.

My house has a Cox Cable DVR that works seamlessly.

[Grisgra]

No digital cable here -- and doesn't look like it'd be worth bumping up to it (standard Comcast here) as the box would still be $15/month.

So looks like TiVo is still the way to go, but no idea what the differences is between Series1 and Series2, etc. I gather this is something I can set up myself, assuming I'm not completely mechanically inept? (Not a safe assumption, by the way.)

[Jezebel]

Yep, for $5 a month I get one from my cable company that records High Def programs also. With TiVO you purchase the box and then have to pay a monthly fee or a lifetime fee IIRC of about $300. It seemed like a no brainer to me.

[Grisgra]

Well, upgrading to digital cable is an extra $12/month, and the box is an extra $10 on top of that, so I may be better off spending $200 on the box and $300 for a lifetime membership, I dunno. Kind of depends on where things are going to be in three years, TiVo-wise.

[Jezebel]

Go ahead a splurge for the exta $12 for digital cable. Its well worth it. Better picture and some on demand type programing. Also many extra channels.

[Grisgra]

So $22/month, or $260/year, to get digital cable + the box, or $500 total to get lifetime TiVo. And most of the extra channels are going to be BBC cooking shows. You understand my ambivalence.

[Jezebel]

True, but if the box ever breaks you call the cable company and they send out a new one. If the technology upgrades in two years, the cable company sends out an upgraded box for free. With Tivo if it breaks you get to buy a new box and new subsrictption I believe. Also you will need digital to go High Def. High Def rocks.

[Freakin]

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Clearly, I'm an idiot for not having purchased it already. Seems like there are a few options available . . . any tips from you folks on where I can get it for cheapest/what the best route is?

[/ QUOTE ]

Grigs,

Don't worry about digital cable, like you said, a bunch of cooking shows and crap. Big benefit is On Demand, but that gets boring quick IMHO. For Tivo you've got a few options. Either get a Series2 of varying sizes, or get a Humax unit w/ a DVD burner. To be honest, I really don't think you need more than the series2 unit. Tivo just rolled out a service called TivoToGo, which allows you to transfer saved programs to your Computer and burn them on DVD, so that is much cheaper than getting the unit w/ an included DVD burner. Also, you can upgrade the Series2 yourself and get a helluva lot of storage space for wicked cheap. I can send you some links if you're interested. I think best buy and amazon usually have the cheapest prices on Tivo, which are generally $10-30 cheaper than other advertised specials. There is almost always a $100 rebate on Tivo's, so take that into account when figuring out prices. Also, if no one else has spoken for it, I'd love your Tivo referral. I've been trying to get a damn ipod for 5 months and I'm only 1 Tivo referral away. So i'd be your best friend if you helped me out.

Freakin

[wonderwes]

If you are going to buy it, buy it on ebay. You will save a lot of money. You can slso buy a modified tivo with a bigger HD for tons of recording space. They sell them here Weaknees (http://www.weaknees.com)

[girgy44]

TiVo is EV+ over everything I have done in my life thus far.

[mdman]

You can get a free DVR (digital video recorder-pause and record live TV) when you activate a Dish Network Satellite System. Channel packages start as low as $29.99 a month. installation and equipment is also free.
Here is a link: www.freedishdeals.net (http://www.freedishdeals.net)

[Paluka]

I'll second the weaknees.com suggestion. You can get more hours than standard (which is nice for keeping every WPT on your tivo) and they have a better warranty than Tivo.

[ddubois]

IMO, don't buy anything, or sign up for any longterm/lifetime memberships, until you fully understand what the implications are going to be with regards to HDTV and any choices you might make in the future.

I own a Tivo-enabled system (Pioneer 810) and love time-shifting as much as anyone, but if I had the chance to do it over I definately would not have bought the at-the-time $800 DVD-burning system I got. (Archiving movies is overrated, particularly given the quality/time constraints.) You don't want to buy a new HDTV and discover you are saddled with SD quality recordings because you bought an old Tivo. So, you need to think about the whole pipeline, rather than just one box, and this certainly includes the programming side.

PS: If you are very computer savvy, you can actually build your own Linux box that does everything Tivo-branded boxes can do, and much more: MythTV (http://www.mythtv.org/). I haven't done so, but my co-worker has, and he can do things like download BitTorrents off the web, then copy them to his Linux box (using Samba) for viewing on his TV. I'm not up to speed on TivoToGo, so maybe this is passe now. But I know MythTV has support for HDTV (depending on your video card) too, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the only HDTV Tivo-branded DVR is exclusive to the DirecTV service currently.

PSS: And you might not even need Linux. MS has Windows XP Media Center Edition, which I think is trying to "do the whole TV <-> PC integration thing", but I know even less about it than I do MythTV.

[AncientPC]

I'm surprised no one has brought this up yet except for ddubois. If you have an old computer or some old parts lying around you can make your own "Tivo" box, aka PVR. This was the route that I took.

It does not require Linux or Windows Media PC, it requires approximately 3 things:

1) ~$55 - Firefly remote. I have a cordless keyboard hooked up to the same machine but the remote is much more convenient.

2) ~$100 - TV tuner card. You want one of the higher end ones (i.e. Hauppauge). Lower end TV tuners have worse quality, I'm not sure about HDTV.

3) ~$40 - Software. There a few offerings out there but I went with BeyondTV, this runs completely fine on Windows. With just the basic software that comes with your TV tuner card you may be able to watch TV / record shows. However you really need to buy the software to take full advantage of the setup and make it Tivo-ish.

Oh yeah, and your computer must be able to output to the TV. Not a big worry if it can't, even $20 video cards have TV-out nowadays.

I bought my stuff from Snapstream:
http://store.snapstream.com/bundles-sidebar.html

It looks like they increased their prices, in particular for BeyondTV (I bought it for $40'ish I believe).

In the end it costs about the same as a Tivo box, but there are a few advantages to it over Tivo:

1) Beyond the initial purchase price, there is no monthly subscription charge ever. You still get a full TV guide, and the ability to only record new shows for a series.

2) Full TV Guide and time shift. You can set aside how much disk space you want to dedicate to time shift.

3) Uncompressed video at top quality records roughly 2GB per hour (MPEG-2). Compressed files at near-DVD quality is 600MB per hour.

4) Expandability. Try adding 500GB into Tivo.

5) You can set up recordings online at work or away from home and it will be updated every 15 minutes at home.

6) SmartSkipping. Basically once you've generated the SmartSkip file for a program (roughly 15-30 minutes after it's been recorded) you can skip through all the commercials with a single touch of the button.

Some of the more tech savvy users who don't use BeyondTV to watch records and prefer DivX (BTV compresses into WMV) have set it up to automatically delete commercials using the SmartSkip file and encode into DivX on a daily basis.

There are some drawbacks though:
1) You have to set aside a computer to basically run 24/7 for this task. I set it to compress the video files during off-peak times.

2) TV quality can be slightly poorer depending on your TV tuner.

3) Slight learning curve to get it up and running. If you don't mind tinkering with setting it up PVR is probably a better option.

PS. I'm not affiliated with SnapStream, I just love my PVR very much. /images/graemlins/grin.gif

[ddubois]

Since my post I've been reading a review of XP Media Center Edition located here (http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=xpmce2005&page=1), and it sounds pretty awesome. I may convert a machine for this purpose. Maybe it isn't strictly necessary, but I suspect for the non-enthusiast user, they probably would prefer an MS solution.

[AncientPC]

I may be overcomplicating setting up BeyondTV.

If you can open up your case stick in a PCI card, plug in a USB device, install drivers, and then run two programs you're set with BeyondTV.

[SuitedSixes]

I also got mine through my cable company. I can record two shows while I watch a third. TiVo doesn't do that.

[bonanz]

I'm pretty sure you can get basic refurbished tivos from their website that are suitable for hacking and adding space if you're nerdily inclined for $99.

edit: http://www.tivo.com/2.0.1.asp

[nef]

I do the same thing, but I use a program called Sage TV:

http://sage.tv/

I love it. You can also rip your dvd library to HDD and view a menu of cover art to pick movies to watch, or stream live tv over your home network if you buy a second client license. There are also a few tweaks you can do to allow scheduling recording programs over the internet, or skipping commercials. I really haven't watched TV in years but have been a computer geek. When I started hearing about these media pc's I built one for the heck of it, now I'm a tv addict. There's always something recorded that I'd like to watch (basically history channel 24/7). I have multiple tuner cards and record/watch several things at once.