TiVo or Replay TV

I have TIVO with my DirecTV and could not be happier. It is a little different using TIVO with satellite instead of cable. Two things. One, since you already download a guide with your satellite, the fee is only $4.99/mon instead of $12.99. (I think there is now a no monthly charge TIVO available that only gets a three day grid at a time.) Second, since my channels already arrive MPEG-2 encoded, there is no analog to digital conversion for the signal. I think this makes it slightly cheaper but it also means that there is no choice in recording quality. It's all recorded just as it came in.

Use could not be simpler. One click to record, a couple of more clicks and you record all episodes. The two tuners make it nice to record one show while watching another or to record two shows at once. One anecdote. I tuned into a show that was about 20 minutes into an hour length the other night. After about five minutes, I decided I wanted to do something else but I wanted to watch the rest of the show later, so I hit the record button and left. The next day when I went to watch the rest, I found that when the show had been repeated later that night, it discarded the partial version I recorded and recorded the show from the beginning.

Complaints. Well. I wish the hard drive was bigger, I "only" get about 35 hours of recording with a 35 MB hard drive. I wish I could find a way to get it to tell me how much free space I have left on the hard drive. And I wish that with the twin tuners, that I could output a different channel on each video output so I could take advantage of the split screen my television does. Oh, and it is esentially a little computer, so it takes a while to start up if the power is interrupted. A momentary loss of power in a storm and you're waiting 3 - 5 minutes for it to boot up again. Oh, and I wish I had a series 2 version so you could use it across a network, though I think that only works between TIVO boxes and not for transfering shows to your computer.

Let me know if you have any specific questions. If you search the web, there are websites that do a side by side comparison of the features of each. Or at least I have seen side by side comparisons.

For the record, I do not really like the Dish Network DVR. Mainly the lack of two tuners, but there were other differences.

 

Good choice.

The recording shows on its own eventually drove me batty. It fills the hard drive. But I do like the suggestions.

What I eventually did was to go turn off the option where it automatically records shows and then I check the suggestions about once a week to see if there is anything I want to watch.

Check your manual or poke around the interface to find out where to do this on your particular machine. For me, turning off the recording was under the setup menu and is something like "TIVO Suggested Recording Options" and the list is under the "Pick Programs to Record" menu as something like "Suggestions."

 

Denver-based EchoStar Communications, which has more than 1 million DVRs in subscriber homes, the pay-TV industry sees the DVR as a vital part of its future. EchoStar plans to give the technology away free to its customers. Its largest competitors, DirecTV and most local cable monopolies, are following suit in rolling out DVR services of their own.

DirecTV, which offers a TiVo-branded DVR for its satellite service, has about 350,000 customers. According to a recent Yankee Group report, 3.8 million U.S. homes will have a DVR by the end of this year, with that figure expected to roughly double annually until it hits 19 million households in 2007.

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