I’ve had an odd relationship with TV throughout my life. When I lived in Spain we had a TV but the local stations were all, obviously, in Spanish. We had VHS tapes and we’d watch Robin Hood or Star Wars or the Miracle of Birth sometimes.
When we moved back to the states we usually had a TV for the news, but shows like Scooby Doo were verboten. I’ve never really been into dramas, so the prime time cop shows never really did it for me. I loved the Fox afternoon lineup in the 90’s with Tiny Toons, Animaniacs and Tale Spin. I’d catch that every day. Eventually we got cable so I started watching more TV, probably way too much in retrospect.
When I moved into my own place I didn’t have a TV for a long time, but then DVDs started to hit so I decided to get a TV and a DVD player. My wimpy surround sound system that was designed for PCs was replaced with a beefier Sony, and eventually I got DirecTV. At the same time TiVo had broken on the scene so I picked up one of the original Series 1 units and paired it to my DirecTV reciever. Pause tv, season passes, TiVo recommendations, everything was good.
Then DirecTV and TiVo made their pact and came out with the integrated DirecTiVo devices, so I upgraded and handed down my series 1. The DirecTiVo was awesome. Record two shows at once while watching another, plus all the TiVo features? Awesome! Eventually I got another one, the second revision of the DirecTiVo for the bedroom.
Recently I’ve been pondering standard definition versus high definition TV and the future of in-home entertainment, and came to the conclusion that true nerdvana might still be a ways off in that space. DirecTV and TiVo split ways, and I’d rather not get cable. When I go to peoples houses that have cable the picture quality seems really bad compared to what I get at home with DirecTV. Maybe the hidef channels are better, but that’s only a handfull right now. Who knows what the cable industry’s going to do to mess with cablecard and TiVo next? Who knows if the Series 3 is actually a good investment or if something better’s going to come along in 6 months?
So I did the only sensible thing I could, I made the best of what I had. Our newer series 2 DirecTiVo got an upgrade, the 180 gig drive from my PC, an OS upgrade that turns on locked features, and a USB dongle. The old series 1 DirecTiVo got replaced with a sister of the series 2 we have from eBay, upgraded with a 300 gig drive, OS upgrade and another USB dongle.
Plug it all togeather and what do you get? 194 hours of recording time in the living room, 264 hours of recording time in the guest bedroom, network sharing back and forth of recorded tv shows between devices, home media option allowing for browsing of pictures, streaming MP3 music, and weather updates from PCs to the TiVo, web interfaces to both TiVos to set recording schedules, rate programs, and search guide data, and the ability to dump shows from the TiVo across the network to the PC and then to DVD, after editing out commercials. If that’s not standard definition TV nirvana, I don’t know what is.
Total cost for this upgrade? Around $250. $90 for a new 300 gig serial ata drive for the PC (freeing up the 180 gig), $75 for a used TiVo off of eBay, and $90 for a new 300 gig drive ata for the eBay TiVo. I had the USB adapters lying around.
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