Thursday, November 30, 2006

Toy Review: HD TiVo

Wednesday the comcast service guys showed up to put the second cable card into my TiVo. They had never installed into a TiVo before and they brought two cards. Fortunately the first one worked and 20 minutes later they were gone and my TiVo was running through it's guided setup.

So all is working great now. Where previously I had a series 1 TiVo with a regular cable box and a second cable box for HD programming (switched through an A/V reciever), now I just have the one HDTiVo. The receiver only has the TiVo, DVD player and AirPort Express for iTunes connected to it. The two cable cards cost a total of $2.70 a month (we'll see when the first bill comes) and I don't need to rent the cable boxes and remotes, so my monthly bill is down a bit. I also used the current deal to transfer my lifetime TiVo subscription to the new box.

The HD TiVo has two tuners so it can record two things at once. The switch between tuners is seemless. If you're recording something and change the channel, it automatically switches to the other tuner. You don't have to think about it at all. If you have season passes setup that conflict, it will record two things at once. Unlike previous TiVo's there's a display panel with the current time and two status lines. Each line has a red light if it's recording and if it's a programmed show (as opposed to one of TiVo's suggestions) it shows the name of the show being recorded. I find this display a bit too small to read from 10 feet away, but it's kinda nice.

The HD TiVo supposedly can hold up to 30 hours of HD programming and of course more of regular programming (there's a 250GB hard drive). For most shows if they are in HD I have season passes setup on HD channels. If it's not in HD or not something where it matters (animation, news, etc.) I record it on a regular channel to save space. So far there are 5 screens of programs saved on it (3.5 are suggestions) and it hasn't had to delete anything yet. Since everything going into the box is digital cable, I don't have a quality setting to choose from, it saves everything in the same format that it comes over the wire. Everything looks great so far.

The TiVo does closed captioning if you want. Since my plasma TV is just a monitor, no tuner, I was missing this. Sometimes it's nice is to watch a show with cc on and at double speed (one fast forward speed) and read the dialog, finish in less than half the time. It's a little convoluted to turn cc on and off but you can customize the font and forground and background color. The TiVo also has aspect controls to show 4:3 programming on a 16:9 screen. It can do full (stretched), zoom (cropped top and bottom) and panel (regular 4:3 with vertical side bars). The nice thing about doing this with the TiVo instead of the TV is that the guide overlaid on the screen isn't stretched or cropped.

I bought the wireless adaptor so it's connected to my home wifi network instead of a phone line. It downloads all the scheduling info from the net. Configuring it was effortless. At first it didn't work and then it suggested I check if I had mac address filtering on and gave me the address to add. I did and it worked. Also there's a screen that gives access to Yahoo weather, traffic and photos as well as some games (connect 4, same game and scrabble) and access to movie theater tickets schedules and ordering via fandango. For Yahoo you login once and it remembers, so you can see weather and traffic for the specific locations in your account, very convenient. I can't imagine ever using it to order movie tickets, but I've already used it for the weather.

My old Tivo was a Sony so I've never had the famed TiVo peanut remote. Instead I use a Home Theater Master MX-500 universal remote. The new TiVo remote has been changed a little and I like it a lot. It is programmable for the volume and mute controls of the receiver and can turn the TV on and off, but there's no button for the receiver power (it would need two as it has discrete buttons, one for on, one for off).

An odd change is that while there are sound effects in the menus, there are no sound effects when fast forwarding or I think at any time a show is being shown. No be-boop be-boop be-boop. I miss these as they gave some feedback when you hit a key.

So overall I'm really impressed with this TiVo. With two tuners it's even more effortless to use. In spite of the fact I've had HD TV for over two years, it's a lot nicer now to watch it recorded on a TiVo due to the channel guide, recording, pausing, etc. It's crazy expensive (I got it as a gift and got a good deal on it at Best Buy due to a salesclerk in nicotine withdrawl) but it's also really really nice.

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