TiVo Unveils Series3 HDTV DVR 309
MegaZone writes "TiVo unveiled their new Series3 unit at CES yesterday. The Series3 is a digital cable ready box, capable of recording two programs simultaneously. It supports cable and antenna input, and it can handle digital or analog cable, digital ATSC, or analog NTSC broadcasts. CableCARD is used for digital cable, and it can utilize a single multi-stream card, or two single-stream cards. The system also sports 2 USB ports, 10/100baseT Ethernet, and an E-SATA port for external storage expansion. Video output is HDMI, component, S-Video, and composite, and audio is optical digital or RCA stereo."
Tivo? (Score:0, Insightful)
It's about time! (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously, the current model looks leaps and bounds ahead of what they originally put forth. I love the display on the front that shows what both tuners are recording. (Although no more sneaking recordings of shows my wife doesn't know I watch, and doesn't think I have time for.) However, I can't help but think that they missed out on a significant piece of the market as people have resigned themselves to using cable company provided DVRs for HDTV. It doesn't help that cablecard implementation at most cable companies is still pretty buggy, and not used widely enough to get debugged thoroughly too quickly.
My bet is that this unit will succeed or fail (and the company with it) depending on how much marketing muscle Comcast puts behind it as part of their alliance with Tivo. Of course, I'm still likely to buy one, as the HD-DVR Time Warner provides for me is horribly buggy...
-JMP
Ethernet? USB? (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the data on the USB disk--is it encrypted or is it readable and usable MPEG files?
Broadcast flag? (Score:3, Insightful)
Does this allow you to record two HD shows at once, only to have to delete them after 90 minutes?
Re:Complete with (Score:4, Insightful)
I do have a mythtv box that I love to death. The price is right, and it's not larded with DRM, etc. That suits my needs.
For other people who are not so concerned, why would I go to the expense of purchasing this + subscription fee when the cable company will give me one that (as far as Joe User knows / cares) does the same thing for $3.50 per month. Tivo can not compete, they are as good as dead.
Re:Ethernet! Finally, for the love of the almighty (Score:4, Insightful)
Incidentally - why does everybody feel the need to list the TV programmes they like to record? It's like music stories - with those people always seem to like to post the "artists" they like. Why? It's a waste of space.
Had a TiVo. Hated paying the monthly fee (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Are people so addicted to media? (Score:3, Insightful)
You see this as some low value item that provides little benefit to you. Don't buy one, and you now what, I don't really care. Enjoy whatever it is that you do. But as a person that enjoys his TiVo, and has for years, it is wonderful to be able to find my whatever time during a week, and the "media" that I want to watch is sitting there waiting for me, and it really didn't take too much work to make that happen. Media sucked when I had to be there at a certain time. Media sucked when I was there, there was nothing on. Media doesn't suck anymore.
Re:Are people so addicted to media? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why some people love TiVo. Most of that media flood is crap. TiVo allows them to select what they want to see and view it when they want instead of being some kind of slave to the TV. This doesn't make TiVo the best solution.
Personally, I think people should drop cable altogether. All the local channels are broadcast in digital, and each cable company carries a different subset of them. The arguement that all the good stuff is on cable is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you'd drop cable and make the broadcasters compete (and increase their market share) they'd start picking up good shows and the quality would increase quite a bit. TiVo would not be needed to sift through it all. Best of all, people wouldn't be paying monthly for any of it.
I don't need cable to watch Desperate Housewives or the Super Bowl - both of which will be in HDTV across the nation over the air. You want to record? Get an HD3000 or Air2PC card and dump to hard drive, convert to DVD (reduced quality), use across your network, whatever. It's amazing to me that the public has decided it's normal to pay to watch TV programs that have already been paid for by advertisers.
OTOH, People pay for bottled water and complain about the price of gas. WTF?
Re:Ethernet! Finally, for the love of the almighty (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes to get grass root efforts going to support the shows/music they like. I never saw "Firefly" when it first came out, but I saw enough people on
Re:Ethernet! Finally, for the love of the almighty (Score:5, Insightful)
I have the same setup, but enough of the "no problems" already. For your average non-techie consumer wanting Ethernet there ARE problems galore with the SA1: willingness to void warranty by opening the unit, obtaining the right size Torx screw driver (which not exactly a common household item like a Philips driver), cutting the right-sized hole into the back of the unit to snap in an RJ45 socket and obtaining said socket and wiring it to a patch cable stub (or just drilling a hole into the back and running a patch cable straight from the card to the outside and having it all look like shite and be prone to having the cable pulled too hard and unplugged or unseating the card), obtaining and installing the necessary Linux software to serve up shows from the box, editing the init script to start it all up, and hoping that after all this the box still works right.
Yeah, no problems at all for your average Best Buy customer.
My use for TiVo is pretty simple (Score:3, Insightful)
I haven't seen a commercial in about a year (thank you 30 second skip), and I just tell TiVo what shows I like, and when I visit it, they're on there. Who knows when the shows play; I don't care.
I watch more shows now than I used to, but spend a lot less time doing it. Win-win, I say.
As to whether I'd let my children spend hours a day getting a media addition in front of a TV: No, and parenting skills haven't really changed since the advent of TV. Bad parents will still be bad parents.
Re:My new HDTV (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the biggest single reason not to get TiVo IMHO. In the 2 years I've had TimeWarner's DVR I've had 2 hard drive failures and I've upgraded to the HD DVR. 3 new boxes, and I'm still paying just $6/month.
Charmin sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
-Eric