teamw23's Full Review: TiVo HD 180-Hours Video Recorder
I was a very early adopter of DVR technology, the idea of turning a hard drive into a kind of smart VCR. I am a huge fan of the idea, not because I am an avid TV watcher, but rather because I find 95%+ of what is on TV these days is virtually unwatchably bad. Most of the time when I turn on the TV - I have 150 channels all showing the same thing: "Nothing I Want To Watch".
A DVR lets you pick out the few gems amongst all the garbage, making whatever time you spend in front of the TV much much more enjoyable. So I have become a complete and total convert to this technology. Other than live sports, I basically don't watch any live TV anymore. I don't even know when most of the shows I like are broadcast.
I had a ReplayTV DVR for almost a decade, but when I finally shifted to HD, it was, sadly, time replace it. These days, if you want a DVR that can record in HD, you have basically two choices:
(1) Renting a DVR from your cable or satellite company; or
(2) TiVo HD or HD XL (if you have cable)
The reason to chose the cable company box is very simple: price. TiVo is ALOT more expensive than renting a cable company DVR. If you want into the TiVo world, you first have to buy the box, then you have to rent a cable card (or two) from your cable company, and then, finally you have pay for TiVo channel guide service on a monthly/yearly basis.
In my case, it turned out to be marginally cheaper per month to get TiVo and rent the cable card vs. the cable company DVR rental, but it would take a decade for me to make up the cost of the TiVo box & service to break even with renting a cable company DVR.
So why would anybody spend so much more to get a TiVo? Because the TiVo is superior in essentially every respect to what you can get from your cable company. If you are a serious DVR junkie, these issues are sufficiently important to you that the price difference is well worth it. Here's a list of the issues that matter.
User Interface: this is a truly critical issue in any DVR. The DVR should be easy to program, reliable, with sophisticated search capabilities that let you easily find what you want and record it with a minimum of hassle. The point of a DVR is to make your TV viewing experience better, and so it should be a pleasure to use. The cable company DVRs remain clunky, with awkward interfaces and buggy software. Go on your cable company website, figure out the model of their DVR and then do a search for comments on that model. Chances are you will find just what I did - people complaining about how it doesn't record things, is difficult to use, freezes up and the like. By contrast, the TiVo interface is easy and intuitive, with powerful search capabilities and good, stable software. It does what it is supposed to do, easily and efficiently.
30 Second (commercial) Skip: Ads on TV are either 30 seconds or a minute. By definition that means any commercial break is divisible into 30 second chunks. A button that automatically skips ahead 30 seconds makes it possible to fly through even a 5 minute commercial break in seconds.
TiVo doesn't ship with the 30 second skip feature but you can enable it by entering a simple code into the remote control. After the ability to find and record programs automatically, this is probably the single most useful feature of a DVR. Fast-forwarding like you would do with an old VCR is an absurdly more primitive way to skip through commercials than the 30 second skip. You still have to watch the ads because you are looking for when the break ends, then you overshoot and have to back up, which is just a joke. It is such a hassle, you probably won't even do it alot of the time.
TiVo keeps the feature disabled by default for the same reason the cable companies don't offer it at all - fear of provoking the wrath of the networks and content providers who want you watching their ads. This is how powerfully transformative 30 second skip is to the TV watching experience. Anybody who has a DVR without 30 second advance is missing out on about half of what makes a DVR so useful. With this feature, you watch hour long shows in 40 minutes and change. Thirty minute shows are about 20 minutes for you.
Recording time: HD video requires huge amounts of disc space. Your cable company DVR ships with a drive that holds only 20 hours of HD content, total, assuming nothing else has been recorded on the drive. If you want to keep a large variety of stuff on your DVR so that you always have a big selection of things to watch, 20 hours is very inadequate. This problem will only get worse as more and more content is HD. My Tivo HD XL has a Terabyte drive, offering 150 hours of space for HD recordings, which is large enough to feel virtually limitless in actual use.
Expandability - TiVo lets you add additional drives, so even the small TiVo HD, with no more room than a cable company DVR, can be expanded. The cable company DVRs offer no ability to get more space by buying an additional drive.
Suggestions - you can give programs thumbs up or thumbs down and TiVo learns those preferences and then records programs which appear to have similar characteristics to things you like. It is a bit hit-or-miss but it does work. I find it does occasionally point out new things for me, things I wouldn' t have found on my own.
Web Programming - Suppose you didn't set the TiVo to record a show that evening and get a dinner invitation while you are at work. You can log into the Tivo site from work and program your DVR over the web to grab the show you are now going to miss. If your TiVo is connected to your home network rather than a phone line, it checks in for instructions about once an hour or so This is not something you are likely to use very often but it is handy. They even make applications for your iPhone/Blackberry that let you do this from your cell phone. Haven't tried to do that yet.
Add-Ons. - The Tivo has a lot of add-on capabilities in addition to its core functionality. One of the most useful is that it will play Netflix "watch instantly" streaming movies. There is also apparently a way to send non-copy protected content out to your computer where it can be converted into a format that can be dropped into your iPod or iPhone. I haven't figured out how to do that yet, so can't comment on it. It also shows your computer pictures on the big screen and gives you access to your music library on your computer. These things are nice, but other than the Netflix thing, are probably not of sufficient importance to tilt the scales significantly in one direction or the other.
So why buy this "HD XL" versus the regular Tivo HD? - The big drive is inside the box. You won't need a second, expansion drive, probably ever. It does come with a nicer, backlit remote control, but I think that's the only other benefit to the XL over the standard Tivo HD.
My list of dislikes is small and short:
(1) They will put little one-line advertisements in the menu. It isn't intrusive or obnoxious, but given the size of the touch on my wallet for the box and lifetime service, I figure I'm entitled not to see any ads in the menus.
(2) There is one other little nit I don't like about TiVo - the odd implementation of the "pause live TV" feature. All DVR's have this. In order to allow you to back up and do instant replay, all DVRs are constantly taping whatever you watch, maintaining a buffer of about 30 minutes or so. This same buffer can also be used if you are watching live TV and the phone rings or your child cries or something, you can pause the show and pick it up later right where you left off. However, there is a strict, 30 minute limit on the pause feature. After 30 minutes, it starts essentially recycling the space, dropping minutes off the back to put new minutes on the front. Given that this is a Terabyte drive, it seems rather silly to have such a short time limit on the pause feature. My 10 year old ReplayTV would allow you to fill up whatever blank space remained on the drive when in pause, which is a far superior implementation of this feature. The way around this is you can just push record at any point during the pause and the show will then fully record without this limitation. However, I find that I often think I am getting right back and then am gone for more than 30 minutes and so I don't hit record and then have lost part of the game I was watching. The work around is to simply use record as pause, but then you have to go back and delete the show which is a bit klutzy, given the otherwise elegantly simple interface.
(3) Finally, the Tivo will send back reports to the mothership about what you have been watching. When they reported that the Janet Jackson Superbowl "wardrobe malfunction" was the most rewound thing ever on TiVo, that shows they are collecting very detailed data on what you are doing. They say they aggregate the data so it isn't traceable to you personally and they give you a way to call them and opt-out of the data collection program, but it is very creepy that you are basically letting some outside company into your living room so they can watch exactly what you watch for their own marketing purposes. It seems particularly galling for you to pay them for that privilege rather than the other way around.
So is the TiVo HD XL for you? If you are a hard-core TV junkie OR a huge fan of DVR technology finally migrating away from an older TiVo or ReplayTV to get HD recordings - the answer is yes. Don't upgrade your TV and then step backwards on your DVR - just put the cost of this in your TV budget and buy it all at once. That is what I did, and I don't regret it. While saying goodbye to my faithful, way-ahead-of-its-time, ReplayTV was tough, this switchover turned out to be fairly painless.
If you aren't already hooked on the DVR concept, this is a lot of money to drop for something at least somewhat similar to what you can rent from the cable company. You can always try the basic, cable DVR and see what you think - if the balky interface, lack of commercial skip and limited space starts to annoys you, then you can always return it and get this later on. But if you already love your DVR and want the best one out there, this is the one.
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