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TiVo - The Next Generation

by Richard Corzo

 

You may have heard of a new class of home entertainment devices called digital video recorders. The power of these far surpasses what you can do with your VCR. Instead of recording TV programs to a tape with 2 to 6 hours of capacity, you can make digital recordings to a hard drive with higher quality and much larger capacity. Beyond that is the ability to find programs through advanced search capabilities in a program guide that is updated daily.

Products like TiVo (www.tivo.com) and ReplayTV (www.digitalnetworksna.com/replaytv/default.asp) give you powerful control over your TV watching. Three months ago I bought a new TiVo Series2 DVR. I'd been curious about such devices before, but had been told on one occasion last year, by a chain store employee, that the TiVo "works best" with satellite TV service. That put me off at the time, since I had cable TV service. I also knew that a phone connection was needed to download the program guide information, and I had no phone jack in my living room. TiVo has since come out with its Series2 models which are more powerful and can connect to a home network. There are also models that have integrated DirectTV satellite tuner capability, but the Series2 is designed to work with cable service or a separate satellite tuner.

Why an article about a consumer electronics device in a computer-oriented publication? The distinction between home entertainment devices and personal computers has begun to blur. For example, in the January 2003 DACS presentation, Frank Powers talked about connections between a PC and a home stereo. Similar things are happening between TVs and PCs. And it turns out that the TiVo digital video recorder runs Linux inside!

Initial Setup

I was excited to bring home my new TiVo and hook it up. Even though it is now possible to connect it to a home network, initial setup does require connection to an analog phone line. A 25-foot phone cord is included that easily reached from my living room to the phone jack in my kitchen. The phone connection can be removed later if you connect the TiVo to a home network. A cable box is optional. If you just use your cable-ready TV as a tuner, you can hook up the TiVo between the incoming cable and your TV. Otherwise you connect your TiVO between your cable box and your TV. In the latter case, you'll need to attach the emitters of the included infrared (IR) control cable in front of the IR sensor on your cable box, so that TiVo can control the cable channel.

Once the physical connections are made, you go through a guided setup process. Using the TiVo remote and viewing the setup menus on your TV screen you'll enter information like your zip code and your cable service provider. Separately you'll also need to activate your TiVo service at their Web site or by calling a toll-free number. This involves choosing a monthly subscription for $12.95 a month or a product lifetime (of the unit) subscription of $299. There is some delayed gratification once the TiVo setup phone calls are made (there are two in the process). Once the initial program guide is downloaded, the TiVo takes a couple of hours to organize the information on the hard drive. You can, of course, watch live TV in the mean time.

What Can It Do?

So what can you do once everything is set up? You can watch live TV a whole new way. If you are interrupted for some reason, you can pause live TV and pick up later where you left off. The TiVo always buffers the last half hour of live TV you've been watching. You could do an instant reply of anything you've been watching in the last half hour. If you arrived late to start watching the current program (but within half hour of its start), you can start watching from the beginning, and fast forward or skip commercial segments until you catch up to live time. You can also press the Info button to find out information on what it is you're watching: program title, description, year released and main actors in a show or movie, and content ratings. The Guide button will let you browse the schedule for the current and all other channels, superimposed over the live TV you're watching, in case there might be something else you want to watch at that time.

Of course, the main motivation for buying a TiVo is to record lots of programs for later viewing. This is where the two weeks of program guide information comes in. You can search by title, time and channel, or set up wish lists by actor, director, keywords, or category and subcategory, like Movie: Action or Sports: Boxing. You can view the wish lists periodically to see what programs match your interests and even set up some to automatically be recorded. Once you find a program you'd like to record, you can find other upcoming showings of the same program, in case its time slot interferes with something else you'd like to record. You can set up a Season Pass, where you can record every episode of a favorite program and prioritize which are more important in case scheduling conflicts arise. You can view a To Do List of programs that you have already scheduled for recording in case you want to make any changes.

Another powerful feature is that of TiVo Suggestions. When you're watching a live or recorded program, you can press the Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down buttons one or more times to indicate how much you like or dislike that program. Recorded programs get one thumbs up by default, which you can override when you watch the program; if you decide it merits more thumbs up, or thumbs down if it turned out to be a bad choice. If you have enabled TiVo Suggestions then the TiVo may take initiative and, space permitting, record programs it guesses you might like even though you didn't explicitly ask for them to be recorded! There's also a place where you can browse through upcoming TiVo Suggestion that you can request to be recorded.

How Good Is It?

Like many other TiVo converts I really do like my TiVo. Recording quality at the best setting is very high, most certainly better than a videotape recording. Although I only have a 27" TV, I am one of those people who have gone into the service menu of my TV and used a calibration DVD to get the best color and accurate geometry I can get by adjusting the settings. On my TV, I'm unable to distinguish the TiVo recording quality from direct digital cable TV viewing. I now have tons of things to watch, so I can ask, "What's on TiVo?" rather than "What's on TV?" If you subscribe to premium cable packages you'll get a lot more value because you can find the movies they show at odd hours and watch them at your own convenience. The WishLists are powerful, because you can harvest programs from the schedule that you would otherwise not even know were being shown.
One feature of digital cable that I have to give up when using TiVo is Dolby Digital audio. With my digital cable service there are certain movies on certain movie channels, like Starz and Showtime, that are broadcast in Dolby Digital, which means that when I connect the digital audio output from my digital cable box to my home theater receiver with five speakers and a subwoofer attached, I can hear five separate audio channels plus one for the subwoofer. The TiVo only records and plays back conventional stereo audio, but I find that to be a worthwhile trade-off for the power of the TiVo. If I really want to watch something in Dolby Digital, I just have to watch it the old fashioned way, on live TV connected to my home theater.


Richard Corzo is a computer programmer currently working in Ridgefield, CT. He has contributed past articles on PC operating systems and utilities. You can contact him at rcorzo_in_ct@yahoo.com.

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