tivo to the rescue
October 20, 2007 - 12:53 PM
I was a Tivo customer for over 3 years. I started first with their series 1 (at the time service was only 12.95/mth). I started using it so much that I ended up having to buy an upgrade kit from Weaknees to double my recording capacity.
A few years later I upgraded my cable service to digital cable and was never truly happy with the integration. The Tivo box would record the output from the cable box just before it went to your TV. So in order to change channels, you would use the Tivo remote, it would change its channel, then send an RF signal to the cable to telling it to change its channel. It was really slow (sometimes 10 seconds to change a channel) and every now and again the cable box would ignore the signal sent from the Tivo and you would end up missing your recording.
Then the HD revolution started. Comcast was releasing their own HD/DVR and at about $10/month it was a steal compared to the original $1000 price tag of the Tivo series 3. So I ditched my Tivo and have been regretting it ever since. The comcast box would freeze and require a power cycle to recover on an almost daily basis. Playback of a saved HD show would stutter every 30 seconds, for sometimes up to 10 seconds making it impossible to watch anything you recorded anyways. It just seemed like the hard drive couldn't keep up with the stream from an HD channel. The same episode of a series recording would be recorded multiple times, wasting most of the already tiny storage space. These problems are nothing new to Comcast who, almost 2 years ago, commissioned Tivo to adapt their software for the Comcast box.
Enter the Series HD. At around $300 price tag it is easily affordable and it still has a dual tuner and more capacity than the Comcast box. The only catch is the $17.95 monthly service fee, especially when I am used to paying $12.95. It had a bit of a rocky start. The service guy from Comcast had never done one before but it went flawlessly. After he left and I connected to the Tivo service to get a list of all the new channels I could access with the cable card things started to wrong. The box kept freezing requiring me to unplug it to restart it. It wasn't picking up any of the configured season pass recordings. After reading the forums it seems this is a common occurrence. So I went to bed ready to ship the box back first thing in the morning.
Waking up the next day and checking the box to see how it faired over night I was surprised. The box was still running, all the recordings for my season passes are scheduled and things just seemed to be working. Not sure what happened, an update from Tivo possibly, even though my software version is the same as it was before, who knows. I have had the new box for about a week now and it works perfectly. Thank god I don't have to deal with that POS from Comcast anymore.
