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."
Woo Hoo! (Score:2, Interesting)
I love my series 2 and all, but honestly i've really been itching for the cable card based series 3 units since i've heard about them.
Hooray for dual tuners in a non-dtivo! hooray for easy expantion too! i just hope these badboys don't cost as much as the hd dtivos...
Ethernet! Finally, for the love of the almighty! (Score:5, Interesting)
The other thing I'm very pleased about is the inclusion of the Cablecard option - this gives Tivo a chance to complete with cable boxes - though local Cox has let people know that while you can use the cablecard, it won't be able to get movies on demand.
Ah, and I was so hoping to see "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalo". Somehow, I think I'll survive. WIth the ability to plug in external drives, this has seriously upset my plans to convert my spare PC into a Tivo replacement once the service on the current box runs out in October.
Of course, there's always the possibility Apple will introduce something - but if they do introduce a PVR/Media device, I'm going to expect it to have the same capabilities down to the cablecard that this new Tivo does before I consider it.
Eh - I'm patient. I have 10 months to wait and see.
Re:Complete with (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunatly for TiVo this doesn't nessesarily mean more money as they sell their boxes fo little profit and make the money on subscription fees, meaning existing loyalties won't make them much money. On the other hand existing tivo users might be inclinded to give their tivos to friends and family and possibly pay for a few months of service long enough to get them hooked.
Does this mean a new Tivo Home Media Engine? (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, with the new Series 3 Tivo, what will developers really be able to do with a new HME...or does Tivo have little interest in opening up more to the developer community?
Trade-in program (Score:4, Interesting)
That's what I hope to see...a trade-in program. I'd happily turn in my 2 Series 2 DVRs for a discount on 2 Series 3. Sure, TiVo can't reuse the parts but maybe they can sell them in 3rd world countries where even cable TV is a gift from the gods. Or since the TiVo is just a Linux box they can change the software a little to make them educational and donate them as a tax write off. Who wants a $100 laptop when you can get a TiVo plus "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing" (though it may be difficult to master with the peanut shaped remote)?
Great! (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess its just living in Canada, which sometimes sits in the stoneage when it comes to certain technology. TIVO has never been available up here, only what the monopolies Rogers (Cable) and Bell(Phone/Satellite) see fit to offer us Canucks.
While Rogers PVR features 2 input recording and is mostly a decent device (the Acientific Atlanta Explorer 8300), I really wish for more competition in the PVR/Digital Cable box market, allowing me to select more robust solutions like DVD/HDD recorders with support for digital cable and HDTV content.
Sony was, I believe, the first to offer CableCard support in their televisions, but I think that Rogers or Bell are so far way from releasing their tight grip of control of digital cable that Canada won't see a cable card solution for at least another decade. In the meantime, some dumb Canadian is paying $1000 more for a Sony TV with a feature they will never use. We are still waiting for even a TIVO like solution where we can subscribe to a third party service for cable recording.
I hope this new Tivo product is hugely successful in the US (as I am sure it will be). Given how much US technology and television market influences Canadians, perhaps if the CRTC (Central Repression of Technology for Canadians) starts getting more complaints about the anti-competitive behaviour of Rogers and Bell and the fact TIVO has never gotten a foothold in Canada, I am sure huge success of a CableCard supported device like this new TIVO will drive Canada to adopt the technology and open up the market sooner rather then later.
In the meantime, after paing $400 for a featurless Rogers PVR and $5/mth to support PVR capabilities on the device, I guess I have to be a good Canadian and ignore my repression and apologize for my bitching.
Re:Complete with (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Complete with (Score:4, Interesting)
After 4 or 5 restarts we wanted to smash the thing into little bits and pieces, Office Space style.
DirecTV putting out cablecards? (Score:3, Interesting)
My HR10-250 is getting installed tomorrow. But I hate how DirecTV is stripping all the cool HME options from their Tivo-powered boxes. So to me this upcoming series 3 Tivo powered by DirecTV would be a killer TV product.
By the way, $600 is NOT the going price for the DirecTV HDTivo if you are a good DirecTV customer, see this thread [tivocommunity.com] for details on getting that price down. My cost was more like $200 after rebates and service credits. I'm fully expecting this device to be obsolete within a year, but to me it is worth it for $200.
My only complaint with TiVO (Score:3, Interesting)
I was lucky enough to be given a TiVO(forgot the series), hacked to 80 gigs, and Ethernet,etc. While it is nice to be able to pause live tv, the only thing I didn't like was the latency with pressing buttons on the cable box.
You try to punch in 040 and you get 0 4 2 seconds later showing up on the TV. I would say 60% of my channel changes were unsuccesful due to the cable box's timeouts. I thought the batteries were bad in my remote control. So I bypassed the tivo entirely, and it switched channels just fine, nice & fast.
Is there a way to turn off "pausable tv" and just push the video straight through? I can live without it. I just wish when I did a plain(ie not scheduled) recording it didn't stop after a half hour. BTW I have no tiVo service. Just using it as a VCR.
My new HDTV (Score:5, Interesting)
I subscribe to basic extended analog cable. I get locals plus standard cable content (Comedy central, lifetime, etc). No premium channels. I have this cable feed running through my Series 1 Tivo and from the Tivo, into my A/V receiver - which outputs the picture only to my TV. In this mode, the TV is essentially a monitor.
I also have a PC w/ Meedio hooked up to this. I used to use the S-video to an old analog TV and that worked ok. Once I hooked it up to my HDTV (TV has PC/VGA in), words can not describe how much of an improvement that makes. The PC has a Soundblaster Live! on it and digital optical out to the A/V receiver....more on that piece later.
The 3rd device I have is a DVD player (Philips DVP-642). Audio is coax digital. Video is components. Both Audio and video feed into my A/V receiver. My receiver has components in and out to the HDTV.
Now that you have an idea of the setup I use, let me lay out some issues I have run into that the Tivo3 may simplify.
1. Of all the devices I have hooked up, my PC w/ Meedio looks the best. And so do all of my downloaded movies and shows. Most of the rips I have are in HDTV and that seems to be the standard nowadays. Why is this important? Because the old "downloaded videos sacrifice quality" no longer holds true. It may not be as good as upscaled DVD's but it is MORE than reasonable.
2. My soundcard sucks. The optical out only outputs stereo sound. I think it will pass through Dolby and DTS but who cares -- that's what my DVD is for. THIS IS A VERY BIG DEAL IF YOU WANT SURROUND SOUND out of your PC. Get a card that can output 5.1 on the fly. As I understand it, most Creative products ONLY output stereo through the digital out. (note: they may "pass thru" DTS/DD but that is different). I wound up ordering a Turtle Beach Montego. Haven't set it up yet.
3. There is very limited HDTV content available. Over-the-Air (antennas), I can pick up all the major networks. Another alternative is to go w/ DirecTV -- but if you subscribe to them, you only get about 2-3 extra channels (I don't count preview channels, etc) more than an antenna. For Dish, its a little bit better -- you get about 4-5 extra channels. Same with Cable. The Point: Each of the above costs an extra $10-$15/mo. And for that, you get at most, 4-5 extra "real" channels that you couldn't get by just sticking an antenna behind your TV.
4. I just ordered a CableCard from my provider (Cox). This allows me to keep my standard "analog" cable that feeds my Tivo while at the same time, allowing me to view the 5-8 HDTV channels that are available. If I had a Tivo3, I could just slap that card into my Tivo3 instead of using my Tivo 1 (for analog) + HDTV tuner on TV set. The Tivo 3 will record whatever you throw at it (HDTV, standard digital, analog, etc) in one nice, neat, little box.
I hope this is helpful to people. There is a lot to think about on how to set things up and these are the major issues that I ran into. I think the biggest disappointment I see is the lack of HDTV content. Just go look at the HD offerings from Dish or DirecTV and you will see that it is very minimal. Perhaps that will change with time but I definitely have that "pay more for less" feeling with respect to my cable/sat bill.
So, if you want to record HDTV, you have the following options:
a) Build a PC w/ HDTV card and use an antenna (unless your HDTV capture card supports CableCard)
b) Build a PC w/ HDTV capture card and use the cable company's Cable box to tune. Note: consider the remote control implications if you choose this. Changing channels = change channels on Cable box.
c) Use the cable companies HDTV DVR (@ $15/mo from Cox. YMMV)
d) USE A TIVO3 w/ CableCard (simplest, easiest, hopefully cheapest)
Hope this helps others who decide to take the plunge.
Requirements and accoutrements (Score:2, Interesting)
(1) Does it still require a landline telephone connection? I have a cable modem for Net access, useful for remote programming, but like many others have dropped the (otherwise) unnecessary landline.
(2) Does it offer, either plainly or through a simple hack, the 30-second commercial skip? The DVR from my cable company allows dual recording while I'm watching another recording, so foregoing the 30-second commercial skip seemed a small cost.
But if the Series 3 drops the landline requirement and offers the commercial skip, as well as records two programs as noted in the posting, it might make sense to get when I upgrade to HDTV.
Sounds great, but is it too late? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ahem. I bought a Series 1 TiVo box in June 2000, later upgraded it myself to 200GB (the absolute most space available at the time), and happily bought a lifetime subscription. (The sort of idiots here who whine and complain about the horrible, awful TiVo subscription fee has always been around and always will; please ignore them.) However, five years later my box sits in the closet. In part it's because a drive died, but it's mostly because, yes, I built a MythTV box.
I *didn't* built a MythTV box because of:
* The subscription fee. See above. I always felt I got way more than my money's worth from TiVo; heck, were I to sell my box on eBay it'd still be worth a few hundred dollars due to the lifetime subscription.
* A desire to export TiVo recordings to elsewhere. I never quite understood the fascination people had and have with decrypting TiVo's file system and exporting programs to elsewhere. If anything I wanted my TiVo to act as the portal through which I could view my video library.
I built a MythTV box because I wanted to:
* Bring programs *into* the box, not out of it. MythTV lets me view all my videos and DVD images in a nice, neat, format that resembles the directory hierarchy they are stored in.
* Record HDTV programs. Thanks to two cable boxes and two FireWire cables, I can today record two HD programs simultaneously.
* Have plenty of storage space. MPEG-2 HD programs take 7GB/hour. about 10 times more than TiVo's about 700MB/GB on the lowest-quality standard. With MythTV I can use NFS (or, in my case due to mysterious performance issues [gossamer-threads.com], Samba) to put all the recordings I want on my 2.8TB RAID 5 array [google.ca]. From the description it sounds like the Series 3 TiVo will have an Ethernet jack, but a) it's likely to be 100Mbps--likely to be problematic in real-life conditions when recording two HD programs and watching a third at the same time--and b) who knows what type of external storage the box will ever support in practice.
That's it. No, I really don't care about MythTV's themability (Why, oh why, do people focus on themes in free software so much? Don't they realize that 99% of them look eye-meltingly awful--Kids, raytracing is, like, *so* 1995--and don't do a thing to fix any underlying usability issues with the application?), MythWeather, MythGame, MythPhone, etc., etc. Hey, they're nice, but I'd give them up in a flash to fix the last niggling bugs in mythfrontend (Geez, folks, what *is* up with the "displaying OSD in some recordings consistently crashes mythfrontend" bug in 0.18.1? Linus used to call such issues "brown bag" bugs, as in bugs in Linux kernel releases so showstoppingly bad he wanted to wear a brown bag for letting it loose into the world.) and the annoyances (some pretty colossal) in MythVideo's Video Manager module. If TiVo Series 3 manages to robustly support external filesystems (I have *no* problems with some sort of encryption scheme here) *and* let me view my preexisting videos through the elegant TiVo interface, I'm there. (Especially if TiVo kindly offers us longtime lifetime-subscription owners free upgrades.) I am, however, not waiting for these things to occur; there's TV to watch, and record, today.
TiVo is dead (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe if they started shipping these units today they would have a chance at saving themselves. But they're not going to have them ready for another 6 months at least?
They announced HDTV support for early 2006 at last years CES, and that was insanity. How can it take one year, much less two, to develop HD TiVo when the capability is (was) already available through DirecTV. By the time this box ships, the DVR market is already going to be firmly in the hands of the cable companies. Most of the market is going to accept a lesser box for $5.95 a month rather than wait around for the privilege of owning an HD TiVo for $12.95 a month. And thats assuming you believe the TiVo will actually be available this year. Last time we heard from TiVo (they haven't said a word about HD for a year), the HD box was supposed to be available *now*.
I bought TiVo when they first came out, and I've given half a dozen as gifts. At this point I won't waste another dime on them.
My 2006 prediction, TiVo will be bought at an extreme discount by a CATV company, the technology cherry picked for their own products and the TiVo name taken, but otherwise the TiVo will be gone.
Re:My new HDTV (Score:3, Interesting)
I have an HD PVR through TWC (extra $6/month, if it breaks it's not my problem). HDTV sucks if you aren't watching HD signal (rips from the internet don't count!)
Most of my favorite shows, and most of the sports I watch is all HD, so it's definately worth it for me!
Homebrew tivo maybe, but NOT cheaper. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Sounds great, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
> 1. You still have a subscription fee (not a concern for some / major >concern for others)
Gosh...you mean you have to actually PAY for a service? Cable is free after all. So is internet access and phone service too for that matter.
I know there are free options out there (Myth etc) but Tivo doesn't exactly hide the fact from users that in order to use their product you need to buy the service. As a bonus, I found in the past that the updated schedules Tivo gets are more often even more correct than the program guide on my digital cable receiver.
> 2. You still have Tivo the company in the mix, which in the past has:
> * Erased user-recorded content
I had Tivo service for 4 years and never once had a problem with this. Maybe there have been a few fluke situations where this happens, but every deletion I ever saw on my box followed the rules I set up when recording the program (Delete after X days, when I run out of space, options like that)
> * Recorded programs that Tivo wanted you to see, without >asking your permission (which in addition to being very annoying, also >used your precious disk space)
There's a simple little option to turn off the suggestions, even my parents could figure out how to turn this feature off on their own. And for what it's worth, the software is designed such that any suggested programs are the first programs deleted when disk space starts to become an issue. So unless having empty drive space sitting there unused makes you feel better this isn't really a problem. If it is, then turn off suggestions.
> * Limited the duration you have for watching recorded content
I can't really argue with this other than mentioning that the only shows I'm aware of this actually coming up on after the initial bugs are PPV shows and other content that if you REALLY want to keep it, you could find another way to record. See the other threads about stripping the DRM off of the
> * Not guaranteed any of Tivos features - They can remove them >as they see fit (conversely, they can also add features, but who's going >to complain about that?)
Again, not going to argue with you about the loss of features, but I don't really recall anything like that having happened. And like you said, you certainly don't complain when they give you bonus features you never thought you'd see like file transfer and network connectivity.
> * Made very questionable deals about subscriber privacy >(selling demographical information, regional data, etc)
Every user of Tivo agrees to have non-identifiable information shared when they sign up for the service. There's no privacy issue here as it's specifically mentioned that there is no tie between the information shared and the specific machine it comes from. Put your tinfoil hat back on.
> 3. And this Tivo box, as with all other Tivo models, is still limited >in what it can do, NOT in terms of hardware and potential, but in what >Tivo will let you do with the hardware you're purchasing.
I'm sorry, but if you compare Tivo to any other commercial DVR out there, it's the most hacker friendly unit out there. While they may shake their fingers and warn that you will void your warranty, it's not like they're Microsoft barring you from XBox Live as soon as they see a modified system connecting to their network.
All this from someone who dumped their Tivo for the Comcast DVR because I wanted HD recording. If/when the series 3 hits the shelves I may just be one of the first in line to get my quality service back.