I love my Tivo! But so did my ex wife. She kept the first one, but I'm on my third now! I don't know how I lived for so long without one!
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Any other TiVo owners here?
- Thread starter heySkippy
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Shumdit said:
But you don't get the same benifits by not paying a fee ... For instance Tivo offers "season pass" where you can decided to only record the First Run shows...no repeats. Even if the show comes on a different night then normal, it'll know that and record it for you.
You an also select shows based on actors or words (like NSX which Bodypainter tried). Just the other week I chose Pamela Anderson as an actor to record. My tivo recorded Regis and Conan because she was a guest. It's features like that that make it worth while to me. I don't like to bother with looking up shows and deciding if a show is a repeat or not.
I agree, a DVD recorder would be nice and easier then transfering to your computer. I send most shows to my laptop so I can watch them on the road...so that feature is easier for me. That way there's no DVDs to loose or deal with.....when the show is over, I just delete it.
MythTV looks really cool, but I suspect that once you put together all the requisite hardware, it would end up costing much more than my TiVo+Lifetime.
Also, my earlier post about break-even in 23 months is not entirely accurate, as it presumes that Lifetime would have zero value at that point. In reality, one can sell a TiVo+Lifetime and recoup a fair amount of the cost.
Also, my earlier post about break-even in 23 months is not entirely accurate, as it presumes that Lifetime would have zero value at that point. In reality, one can sell a TiVo+Lifetime and recoup a fair amount of the cost.
TiVo is amazing, a hacked TiVo is far far more amazing. See here for what I have mine doing:
http://www.essexpc.org/tivoweb/tivoweb.htm
btw i need to update that site, i also now have it streaming shoutcast stations, displaying RSS feeds, weather, theater listings and doing caller ID.
http://www.essexpc.org/tivoweb/tivoweb.htm
btw i need to update that site, i also now have it streaming shoutcast stations, displaying RSS feeds, weather, theater listings and doing caller ID.
bodypainter said:I have DirecTV TiVos so no multi-room sharing for me.On the other hand it's $5 a month for the first TiVo and the rest are no additional charge. DirecTiVos have dual tuners also, a nice feature.
The hard drive died in one of my units last year so I bumped it up to 100 hours & am liking that. I had bought a standalone DVD recorder about a year ago and was using it quite a bit but then it died. Am hassling with warranty repair in it now. Not particularly happy with Phillips on this.
you can do multiroom sharing with a hacked directivo running the 4.0 standalone software. it enables the HMO option on the directivo units.
Yeah, my biggest holdup is I don't have a Wintel PC to load the software onto the TiVo drives. I do have a TiVo hacking friend over in Orlando that I'm hoping I can just send a couple new hard drives to and have him load them up for me. It just hasn't bubbled far enough up my priority list yet.robr said:
you dont necessarily need a wintel machine, any machine that runs linux should be fine, regardless of the hardware architecture (assuming it accepts standard IDE drives). a wintel machine can be handy to back up your drive to (FAT32 partition only), but when i do this, i just pull out the original drive and put it up on a shelf and start from scratch. if there's ever trouble, you have the original drive to go back to. if you go that route, you dont need windows at all.
We're an all-Mac house. I'm capable of swapping or adding hard drives to our computers but I really don't want to try to partition and install some Linux distro. Can I get a bootable Linux CD? Even better, would the tools work with the BSD subsystem that our OS X machines run on? I know just enough Unix to know not to type rm -f at a command prompt.
Actually yes, you can get a bootable Linux CD with all the Tivo tools necessary to do this. See here:
http://www.ptvupgrade.com/bootdisk.html
I cannot stress enough, don't use your original drive. Things can go wrong far too easily. If you want to try this and have a series 2, I'd recommend a Netgear FA-120 USB ethernet dongle. Series 1 will require a proprietary network card, and 2.5 I'm not too familiar with, things can get tricky with the 2.5's because of some new DRM type stuff.
The ultimate place for info about hacking your tivo is here in the forums:
www.dealdatabase.com
It's a COMPLETE and utter disorganized mess, it drives me crazy, but they love it that way as they claim it makes you actually have to work to learn this stuff (true, but still annoying).
http://www.ptvupgrade.com/bootdisk.html
I cannot stress enough, don't use your original drive
. Things can go wrong far too easily. If you want to try this and have a series 2, I'd recommend a Netgear FA-120 USB ethernet dongle. Series 1 will require a proprietary network card, and 2.5 I'm not too familiar with, things can get tricky with the 2.5's because of some new DRM type stuff.The ultimate place for info about hacking your tivo is here in the forums:
www.dealdatabase.com
It's a COMPLETE and utter disorganized mess, it drives me crazy, but they love it that way as they claim it makes you actually have to work to learn this stuff (true, but still annoying).
Tivo will change your life. I can't stand commercials, so now I just let a show record for 20 minutes, then start watching - ffwd through all the pitchmen! I love it!
The season pass manager makes it easy to be certain I never miss an episode of Overhaulin, Rides, Biker Build Off, The Sheild, Nip / Tuck, Rescue Me- anything.
Two shows on at once? record one, watch the other, or record both and go to dinner. You can just set the season pass, fire and forget- Never miss a show. No tapes neccessary, when you are done just delete it, and there isn't any distortion from reusing the same tapes over and over.
F1 is on @ 1:00am? Got it!
Watching something but have to do something more important? Hit record.
Grabbing a beer when the unbelieveable happens? Rewind, and see for yourself.
Sunday Football will never be the same...
That last play was unbelievable! Really? Lets watch it again! and again! and again! and again! ect... You can rewind while the unit records, so after you have your fun reviewing the play you can just speed forward through the next commercial and catch up to real time.
The Superbowl?
Wait a second... Was that Janet Jacksons breast? Dude, rewind that, ok... pause... Holy $#^t!
As far as the additional cost, it is part of my Direct TV package, and I pay less for that than I did for digital cable.
Well worth the $$$ IMO (can't you tell?)
Philip
The season pass manager makes it easy to be certain I never miss an episode of Overhaulin, Rides, Biker Build Off, The Sheild, Nip / Tuck, Rescue Me- anything.
Two shows on at once? record one, watch the other, or record both and go to dinner. You can just set the season pass, fire and forget- Never miss a show. No tapes neccessary, when you are done just delete it, and there isn't any distortion from reusing the same tapes over and over.
F1 is on @ 1:00am? Got it!
Watching something but have to do something more important? Hit record.
Grabbing a beer when the unbelieveable happens? Rewind, and see for yourself.
Sunday Football will never be the same...
That last play was unbelievable! Really? Lets watch it again! and again! and again! and again! ect... You can rewind while the unit records, so after you have your fun reviewing the play you can just speed forward through the next commercial and catch up to real time.
The Superbowl?
Wait a second... Was that Janet Jacksons breast? Dude, rewind that, ok... pause... Holy $#^t!
As far as the additional cost, it is part of my Direct TV package, and I pay less for that than I did for digital cable.
Well worth the $$$ IMO (can't you tell?)
Philip
flaminio said:
Not true. I spent about $800 for a three-TV MythTV system consisting of one server/playback machine (called a backend/frontend in Myth parlance) w/ DVD R+W drive and two refurbished XBoxes (frontends). This includes two tuner cards (two simultaneous recordings/viewings) and 380 gb of storage (about 180 hours at max quality compression or 1000 hours at "good" quality compression), and no monthly fees.
What would a roughly equivalent TiVo system cost? According to the TiVo website, a TiVo incorporating a DVD recorder such as the Humax DRT-800 costs $400 with 80 hours of storage. A lifetime TiVo sub costs $299. So for a one-TV setup with lifetime we're at $699. For additional units, the cheapest TiVo listed is a refurbished 40 hour unit for $49.99. Additional lifetime subs costs $6.95/mo per unit (or $299 each if you did not want to pay monthly). So for $799 you'd have a 3-TV setup (with 20 fewer total hours) and still have to fork over $13.90/mo, or with no monthly fees, $1397.
guess it all depends how you do things, since it sounds like you're handy with computers, you dont need the DVD/tivo unit... if you go satellite and directivo, you get a directivo for $99 that records two channels at once, drop in your own 160 gig drive for $70. get a usb ethernet dongle for $30. tivo service is $3/month if you have directv and you can hack the tivo to dump content direct to your pc (you can even stream to the PC or stream off the PC back to the TiVo). Add costs for however many TiVos you like.
I have never tried Myth, but I've checked out the website and screenshots and read user comments and it seems like a great alternative if you have the hardware sitting around, but I'd rather just go the TiVo route if I'm starting from scratch, especially if one already has DirecTV. I'd never buy a lifetime subscription, it attaches to the box, not your account. If the box breaks, TiVo isn't known to be very flexible when it comes to rolling over your sub to a new box. If you just buy the latest and greatest, you're out of luck when it comes to transferring.
I have never tried Myth, but I've checked out the website and screenshots and read user comments and it seems like a great alternative if you have the hardware sitting around, but I'd rather just go the TiVo route if I'm starting from scratch, especially if one already has DirecTV. I'd never buy a lifetime subscription, it attaches to the box, not your account. If the box breaks, TiVo isn't known to be very flexible when it comes to rolling over your sub to a new box. If you just buy the latest and greatest, you're out of luck when it comes to transferring.
newby said:
I guess it's all about your priorities. I tried a free promotion for the full version, and never used it after the first time I activated it. I basically know what shows I want to record, so Iits set up to record them every week with no input from me. So if it occasionally records a repeat episode? Oh, dang gotta push 2 buttons and it's gone. No reason to spend a monthly fee for that. I guess if you are too scatterbrained to know what is on it might be a problem, but it works fine for me.
Just curious, what is TiVo's position on modded boxes, and can they be shut down remotely (as DirectTV did to modded access cards)? I wouldn't mind hacking around with a TiVo but being ECM'd is a concern.
Russ said:
I'm not the foremost expert on the subject, but I think it comes down to what kind of hacking.
Theft of service (ie, making your TiVo pick up guide data without subscribing) is the big no-no. I don't even know where it's allowed to talk about that.
Direct extraction of video files - TiVo doesn't like this because it gets the content providers all gritchy. No talking about this at tivocommunity.com but you can at dealdatabase.com and tcrebel.com.
Hacking to enable hidden features, load different versions of software, add alternate interfaces - these are fine. Maybe not officially TiVo approved but okay.
Some 'hacks', most enabling back door features, will be overwritten when you reboot your TiVo. There is a signed kernel and it'll be reloaded if it's been modified. For the most part this is annoying but not overly obnoxious. These types of hacks are usually entered via the remote and most TiVos only reboot when the power fails.
Other stuff, like putting the standalone 4.0 software on a DirecTiVo won't be overwritten on reboot because it replaces entirely the software that came with the unit.
Standalone TiVos get their software updates over a phone line along with their guide data. There is very little a user can do to keep TiVo from borking their unit if they wanted to. Without that daily call, your TiVo will be a paperweight in two weeks.
DirecTiVo gets guide data and software updates via satellite and the daily call home is optional with one caveat. Software updates will not be activated until the call is made. As you might guess this can be a good thing or a bad thing but at least the user has some say in the matter.
In the end I'd say that TiVo has been fairly cool about hacks. I don't see a parallel to DirecTV nuking the receiver cards of people stealing their service at all.
bodypainter said:
I pretty much agree with everything bodypainter has mentioned. The only thing I'll add to that is there is a flag you can set when you've modded the bootloader (using the 'killhdinitrd' hack) that will prevent the TiVo from accepting updated software from TiVo/DirectTV.
All in all, TiVo is pretty cool about modding the hardware (except where theft of services is involved and the entire TiVo community will come down on you hard if you write about such things). As a company, TiVo isn't doing very well and the community wants to do everything they can to help keep them alive.
robr said:
That's one reason why I went the MythTV route - I didn't relish the prospect of owning three or four boat anchors if TiVo went belly up. Another is that it's none of TiVo's business what I watch on TV (recall their pronouncements vis a vis the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction).
Being tied to the changing priorities and policies of one corporation was not attractive to me either. For instance, a few months ago TiVo announced it planned to start displaying their own pop-up ads when a user fast-forwards through commercials. Whether or not TiVo followed through with this plan, I found it repugnant considering one of the main selling points of DVRs is skipping commericals - not subsituting one form of commercial for another. This was one of the factors which influenced my choice to go with MythTV. BTW MythTV totally rocks in this respect, with its fully automatic commercial skip. It works so well that on some shows, which fade back to the same scene they cut from, you wouldn't even know a commericial was there.
I imagine that if TiVo goes belly up, we'll still be ok, people have already figured out the hack to continue free service, all you'd need is the guide data which is readily available from a number of sources. Hell, Ultimate TV is long gone and people with those boxes are still up and running.
I agree about the commercial fast forward thing (though I'll never see that with my software updates turned off and I'm sure there will be hacks available to disable it, even though that would be stepping on TiVos toes).
As far as the Janet Jackson thing, that disturbed me as well. TiVo claims they strip all user data from the statistics so they just have a global pool of stats with no user ID attached, but I don't like that they can do it at all.
The geek in me would love to check out Myth, but my wife doesn't like change, we have something that works perfectly well, and the investment for the hardware to get something that can do real time encoding of 2 channels at once is just too steep. So the geek in me is happy hacking away at the TiVo and teaching it new tricks.
I agree about the commercial fast forward thing (though I'll never see that with my software updates turned off and I'm sure there will be hacks available to disable it, even though that would be stepping on TiVos toes).
As far as the Janet Jackson thing, that disturbed me as well. TiVo claims they strip all user data from the statistics so they just have a global pool of stats with no user ID attached, but I don't like that they can do it at all.
The geek in me would love to check out Myth, but my wife doesn't like change, we have something that works perfectly well, and the investment for the hardware to get something that can do real time encoding of 2 channels at once is just too steep. So the geek in me is happy hacking away at the TiVo and teaching it new tricks.
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