TiVo = omgwtf

[Slamz]

I just got a TiVo. This thing is fucking awesome. Why didn't someone tell me it was this fucking awesome?

Kind of expensive. But fucking awesome.

I'd heard about them before but it's even better than I thought.

There's TV I like to watch, or would like to watch, if I could remember when stuff came on and wasn't always doing something else when it did. Then when I do sit down to watch TV, nothing is on.

TiVo fixes that.

So I tell it to record Farscape and select season pass. This means it will record every Farscape that the Sci-Fi channel plays, automatically culling out multiples (so it won't record the same episode twice). If it's a show you're already watching, you can tell it to only record new episodes, so it won't record repeats from the last season, if you don't want it to.

But what's awesome is they have every single program on every single channel broken into different catagories. Like Futurama is listed under "Animated" and "Sci-Fi". Probably under "Comedy" too.

So I can go to Sci-Fi, hit the letter "A" and scroll through the entire list of every show on every channel that could possibly be called sci-fi. Find one I like (Futurama!) and just tell it to start recording every Futurama that shows up. Or if there's one in particular I want I can start typing in the name and it'll jump to that part of the list.

So I went through and picked a few shows I wanted. Now it's going to start automatically finding and recording them for me, even the ones that play at 3am that I didn't know existed.

So then, when I have time to sit down and watch something, I can hit a button, see what the mighty TiVo has recorded and pick from the list.

It's like there's always something on TV. It's a program I wanted to watch and it's just now starting, even though it's 3:47pm on a Sunday or whatever.

Goddamn, do you realize all the shows I missed that I could have seen if I'd had a TiVo? Documentaries, movies, don't worry about it, just look through the list, find something good on and tell it to record it. No tapes, no messing with times, just bam, more good stuff ready to watch when you want to watch it than you can shake a stick at.

Hells yeah. This could be some kind of TV revolution for me.

[Grieve]

Yeah, I was looking at them on Amazon the other day, looks pretty cool. They have a $100 rebate right now, so you you can get the basic 40 hour one for $79 with free shipping.

I only watch one TV show (Lost), though, so it would probably be a bit of a waste.

But Lost rocks.

[Veraphim]

Hmm, I didn't know TiVo did all that.

I thought it was something that just cached so much, and let you put shows that you WERE watching on pause while you used the water closet or let you insta-replay something.

I might have to pick up one of those. My TV is on the other side of my apartment from my computer and I miss alot of stuff because I forget what time it is, or would rather keep playing a game.

What does the TiVO recod to? DvD? HardDrive?

[Slamz]

Internal hard drive only. If you want to record a show for someone else, you'll still want to use a VCR.

It does also let you pause live TV.

It also has a sort of Amazon-like feature. You can thumbs-up or thumbs-down a program and the next day the TiVo will have a list of other shows you might like, based on what you've said you liked so far.

Also, if you hook it into your network and use always-on broadband, you can schedule it to record something while you're away. So like you're at work and someone says there's this awesome show on at 5pm, before you can get home, you can remotely tell your TiVo to record it.

The service is where the expense is, though. It's either $12/month for the subscription or $300/lifetime of the product. I don't think you have to have the service, but without that the TiVo won't know what shows are playing when.

Given what the service does for you, though, I think it's well worth it.

[Grieve]

You can also upgrade the hard drive to a larger one (if you don't mind voiding the warrenty). The 40 hour TiVO has a 40GB drive inside, but you can buy a standard computer 160GB drive for 80 bucks and add that as a 2nd drive, giving 5 times as much recording space.

You can also buy TiVos with built-in DVD recorders, if you think you might want to save the shows you record for posterity.

Another nice thing you can do is buy two TiVO boxes and connect them to your broadband network. Then you can record a show downstairs, and watch it upstairs (over the network).

I wouldn't recommend buying the lifetime subscription...a lot of cable companies are building TiVO-like services into their cable boxes right now, so eventually you'll get the service free (or at a reduced cost).

[GreenTurnip]

I have a ReplayTV... same thing. And while its pretty neat... I just don't watch enough tv to make it worth it. I use it pretty seldomly... One thing that I dont like is that it records shows at a lower quality than a normal tv to save space. You can increase the quality in the options... but this sucks up a TON of hard drive space. If you watch a recorded show on regular quality, it appears grainy. For someone who llikes DVD quality picture and sound... this bothers me.

My 2 cents.

-turnip

[Slamz]

Yeah, Tivo defaults to "High", whatever that means. There's 1 higher quality ("Best") and two lower ("Medium" and "Sucks" or something like that).

I bought the biggest one they make because I'm a sucker for electronics, so if High turns out to not be that good I should be okay to go with Best.

I probably will mod it later, but it voids the warrenty, so I'm probably not going to touch it until that runs out.

It has extra video inputs on the back, too. I wonder if I can plug my X-Box into it and use it as an "instant replay" on video games...

[Ulfen]

I purchased a TV-Tuner card for my PC and a program called Snapstream Beyond TV 3. It works just like TiVo but there is no subscription fee, you can record the programs from VHS - DVD quality and burn them right on to your cd or dvd.