How did I live without this?
Last night we bought a toy I’ve wanted for ages. A nice shiny Tivo. They have a $150 rebate going right now if you get a year’s service. We went with the cheapest 40hour unit at $170. After rebate our net out-of-pocket is $20. Not bad. I know it’s going to be a bit small but we wanted to try one out before jumping in for a $400 Tivo.
I got home and hooked it up. Now there’s a little task for ya. We’ve got our 51″ HDTV, HD cable box, Sony audio receiver for sound, DVD player, VCR, Xbox, and now a Tivo in the system. The back of the TV looks like spaghetti. The actual hooking up wasn’t too bad I guess. Luckily the TV has 5 inputs and the Tivo doesn’t support HD so I could just use one of the S-videos I wasn’t using. I had to run a phone line from the kitchen across the floor for its initial setup call it makes to get programming info and such. It took about an hour to do that and I was ready to watch TV. After the initial phone setup I plugged a usb ethernet dongle in the back and hooked it to my home network. Now it doesn’t need the phone line and can get updates and program guides over the Net.
The picture quality is a bit worse because the signal now leaves the cable box to go through the Tivo and on to the TV using S-Video instead of the component output straight from the cable box to the TV I usually use. I can still use the composite for HD programming but lose the Tivo funcionality. They are supposed to be releasing a HD Tivo by the end of the year. I may look into that. The guides and recording parts of the Tivo are very easy to use and fun to find those weird programs at 3 in the morning you might want to record. My wife is currently teaching our son about the Revolutionary War so we decided to try the search out. We looked for ‘revolution’ and it came up with a series airing at 4AM on Sunday on like the Military Channel. It’ll record that automatically now and he can watch it during school.
I had thought about one for years but got pushed over the edge when I read about the Tivo Desktop software. It lets you play music and photos from your computer to the TV. Even better it gives you the ability move recordings from your Tivo to your computer over the network to watch or burn to DVD for archiving. The features of the latest release are even better. It’ll automagically convert the video file to download to your iPod or PSP. Being able to watch Battlestar Gallactica or WRC on the go is going to be so sweet.