Deane Barker
Andru Edwards
David Ponce
Gareth Branwyn
Glenn Fleishman
L.C. Angell
Matthew Haughey
Phil Torrone
Sal Cangeloso
Blake Robinson
TiVo’s going HD: The Series 3
If you’ve got a nice flat TV and High Definition cable, you’ve been out in the cold for the past couple years. Until recently, TiVo didn’t offer a compatible product, forcing me and everyone else to use an inferior product: the cable company-provided DVR.
About six weeks ago, a Comcast truck rolled away from my house and I finally had my new Series 3 TiVo up and running. For the past year, I’ve been using Comcast’s HD DVR and it’s been a bear to use, buggy, and unreliable (my review). I bought a Series 3 TiVo on the day it was released just to get away from the old box. What follows are my impressions from my time so far with the new device.
The high points:
- Hands down, still the best interface in recordable TV. I realized I was watching less TV and not marking new programs to be recorded on my old Comcast DVR because the interface was so cumbersome and time-consuming. The TiVo is just natural to use.
- HD video quality is perfect, standard def at high quality looks great too, much better than the default Comcast DVR recordings. Since the 250Gb drive can record hundreds of hours of standard TV, I set it to High Quality (2nd highest) and was impressed as it was much better than my Comcast DVR’s standard def recordings.
- Setup was a snap. Networking and wiring was easy and guided setup was painless, all cables (including HDMI!) are included with a nice quick-start guide. If you want to go wireless, the TiVo USB 802.11g network adapter worked by simply plugging it in.
- Season Passes, Overlap protection, dual tuners all mean pretty much everything you want recorded gets recorded. If you have only used single tuner video recorders, you will be impressed by the ability to record two things at once while watching a recording at the same time. It’s very rare to have three programs on at the same time that I want recorded.
- Set it and forget it. After wrestling with a Comcast DVR that rebooted itself randomly everyday and frequently forgot to record shows, the TiVo has been bulletproof in the couple of months that I’ve had it. It just plain works, as any great technology product should.
Onto the low points:
- Waiting for CableCards from your cable company is a drag (not entirely TiVo’s fault). When you buy a new device you think “hot dog! I want to use this NOW!” but unfortunately most cable systems will require a technician visit to deploy the two required CableCARDs. For me, that meant I had my TiVo for almost two weeks before I could watch any HD channels on it.
- Sometimes, there is a bit of a lag. If you have owned a TiVo in the past, you’re probably used to a pretty snappy interface and I’ve found overall the Series 3 box is a little bit slower. Some menus have a 1-second lag between picking an option and it sticking and like most digital recorders, channel surfing isn’t super fast because it is recording at all times, even as you switch channels.
- Even though it costs more, it does less. If you’ve owned a Series 2 TiVo before, you’ve probably enjoyed the features of downloading shows to a laptop and if you owned more than one, you could transfer shows between TiVos in your house. Both features are disabled on the new device, due to a variety of piracy concerns.
- The price is high. No doubt, the biggest drawback to the Series 3 TiVo is the price. Suggested list is $799 and if you shop around you can save about $100 off that price. On top of the high cost of hardware, you also have to pay for a monthly subscription in 1, 2, and 3 year increments (that range from $12.95-19.95, depending on length). This is definitely high end gear and it carries the price to match.
Conclusion
If you love HDTV and you never want to miss another second of sports action while at the same time recording shows, there is no finer addition to your home theater than a Series 3 TiVo. The biggest stumbling block is definitely the price, which doesn’t end when the box shows up, but continues to cost you money on a monthly basis after the fact.
So I guess the question is: is perfect TV recording worth $800 + $13-20 per month?
November 17th, 2006 at 9:41 pm
The problem I’ve found with recording HD is the stunning amount of storage space it takes. 250GB helps, I suppose.
I wonder if there’s a standard algorithm for determining the different between storing HD and standard? So, if I can store X minutes of standard, I can store Y minutes of HD.
November 20th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
I know my current unit says it will pause of an hour on SD and fifteen minutes on HD. That would suggest that an HD signal takes roughly four times the space, although I’m sure there’s more to it than that.
November 21st, 2006 at 11:14 pm
I’d say HD takes about 10x the amount of storage as standard definition. My old Comcast DVR had a 120Gb hard drive and could record about 14 hours of HD content, but about 100 hours of SD content.
TiVo advertises this Series 3 box as able to do 32 hours of HD, 300 hours of SD at the lowest setting.
I’d say the general rule is about 10Gb per hour of HD, 1Gb per hour of SD as a rough estimate when picking hard drive sizes and capabilities.
November 22nd, 2006 at 4:45 pm
I wish that there was an option to not have the recorder record the channel you’ve just changed to, for the first 10 seconds it’s on that station. Then flipping through channels would be faster, like regular television. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this or implemented it?
November 22nd, 2006 at 7:52 pm
Warrenpeace,
The way DVRs work they have to ‘record’ everything. The signal comes in and goes directly to the tuner. Analog signals go to an encoder. DVRs today have one data path from there - to the storage media, then it reads from the media and sends it to the decoder for output.
While it could be possible to do some bypass and feed the encoder to the decoder without passing through the media, you wouldn’t gain that much. There is still going to be some lag from the encode/decode cycle. DVRs really aren’t designed for ‘channel surfing’. You’d have to redesign them to have a separate data path for surfing, and there isn’t much point in doing that. Instead of surfing they have program guides, and many DVR owners just don’t channel surf since they have recordings now.
No one has done it because the demand isn’t sufficient to justify the cost of doing it.
November 23rd, 2006 at 5:10 pm
I haven’t yet made the jump to HDTV, so I’m still using my Series 2 Tivo with a regular TV. I’d like to buy a plasma set and go with either a Series 3 or the soon-to-be-unveiled Comast/Tivo DVR.
One question I have is whether Tivo (or any other DVR) has a way of programing the pause time, so a picture isn’t frozen long enough to bun in on the plasma TV. It seems like the Series 2 will pause for at least a half hour, with the picture on the screen (though I’ve never timed it). That seems like a sure burn-in situation if one of our kids pauses a show and forgets about it.
Anyone have any thoughts about this?
November 24th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
Is this the box that’s going to save Tivo? Seems unlikely at a $799 retail price. I called Tivo and they are not willing to deal. Even the sales rep admitted it’s out of reach for the majority of their target market, including him. Perhaps Tivo is confident their IP litigation will prevail, but in the meantime, they continue to lose market share to cable and satellite providers supplying customers with DVRs that are functional enough and a fraction of the cost of Tivo boxes. DirecTV customers can obtain the HD DVR for as little as $199 and while it’s not Tivo, it’s hard to justify $800 for the Tivo features and brand.
December 1st, 2006 at 1:51 pm
One word:
MYTHTV
December 4th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
I have a directv tivo. The ratio between HD recording and SD recording from directv is 6 to 1.
December 4th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
I’ve recently switched from mythtv to comcast HD DVR. Main reason I did this is because I want to record shows in HD. I didn’t invest in an HD tuner card for my mythtv because the only HD material that I would be allowed to record is over the air.
December 18th, 2006 at 7:16 pm
i owned a series 1 tivo for 6 years. i then “upgraded” to a series 2 and was appalled with the picture on my panasonic ED plasma. 2 days of scouring the tivo community boards confirmed my suspicion - the series 2 had a worse picture due to only 1 chip doing both encoding and decoding vs. the series 1 which had 2 better quality chips. that said, i upgraded the hard drive on the series 1 and the series 2 was relegated to a 20 inch tv (where it looks fine). the fact that tivo has done away with lifetime membership is the single biggest deal killer for getting a series 3. if they would re-instate it, i’d consider. but for now, i’m waiting for apples supposed ‘tivo killer’ or i’ll roll my own HTPC for HD.