After an otherwise bleak weekend of seeya-soon’s and somewhat stressful travel* I’m home again, with a newly installed TiVo 3 under my TV and a fist full of gift cards in tow.
*heart*
I had a TiVo 1 a while ago and was pretty satisfied with it for a long while… it lost it’s place under my TV not so much of anything that TiVo did but more because of what TiVo wasn’t doing and what Comcast was doing: TiVo Series 2 didn’t support HD and the Comcast cable box simply ignored IR commands… there’s only so many times that you can accidentally record Animal Planet and be happy about it… The IR blaster just stopped behaving. And I started to notice that TiVo was sort of pricy, for what it did: record video.
At that time, Comcast started offering a DVR box that was $5/month, came with two HD tuners, and ran Microsoft-built software – sounded like a good deal to me, so I switch. With the MS software installed, some people liked it – some people didn’t. I was OK with it. It did just as much as TiVo and it misbehaved a lot less than what I had been living with. Once I saw the piece of shit software they replaced the MS bits with, I found that I liked the MS version a lot better. In fact, I’d bet that most of the people in western WA that had once complained about the Microsoft based software suddenly missed it after the change.
The newer Comcast software did at least offer one nice new feature: support a skip-ahead-30-seconds option, if you used a third party universal remote control, which I do. From what I’ve seen so far, the TiVo Series 3 software doesn’t support this so I’ll have to accept that as a lost feature… but the rest of the Comcast DVR quirks just pissed me off and are no longer my problem. Like not being able to turn off the cable box if it’s recording – it gives you the option to turn off the box via an onscreen menu and if you do that, you stop recording – or the fact that every fourth button press was simply ignored by the box…
So why the change? With Series 3, the hardware has stepped up and has knocked the cable box out of my living room. With support for CableCARDs, I don’t have to worry about IR blasters any more, so that’s one gripe from the TiVo 1 days that’s been solved. Because it’s a Multi-Stream card, I get dual tuner support – and there’s a second slot if I had a Single-Stream card – so that’s another solved problem. In the Guide, I can now see what shows have started, which is something the newer Comcast software screwed up. I get the long lost TiVo UI, which feels like an old friend returned. In their guide, I get to filter on the channels I want to – why bother seeing what’s on Fox Movie Network if I don’t subscribe? With the new hardware, I seem to have picked up auto-stretching for 4:3 channels on my 16:9 screen or I can leave the bars (and choose between black or gray bars!). I can stream movies, audio, and pictures to my TV too, if I don’t feel like turning on my 360 or Mac mini. I can plug in an external SATA drive, if I need more storage. I can send any video to my TV with either HDMI or SVideo cable which makes it easier to go split screen with other devices. With TiVoToGo I can grab video from the box and put it on either a PC or a Mac (or a Zune or an iPod). Since TiVo doesn’t turn itself off, I don’t have to worry about the powering down issue I had with the old cable box.
I guess that explains it, neh? I mean, it’s looking like it’ll be about the same price… I get to take off the cost of the cable box itself and the extra I was paying for the DVR – the monthly cost of TiVo should be about the same, if I prepay for a year. The setup went OK – it took two calls to cable and an hour of waiting to get the card activated, but considering that my last cable issue took three calls, that’s not so bad. The quality of the picture and sound are about the same, although I’ve seen some hiccups on HBO HD – since it’s still loading data, I’m not going to be concerned about that. Of course, now I’ll have to bring the box back to the Comcast office – it’s not that it’s far, but it’s been busy the last few days…
Methinks some people have been upgrading to HD TV’s this Christmas.
* Yes, it was a bleak weekend. I left CT on Saturday… I had a 5pm flight out of JFK – I figured it would give me some more time in CT before flying back, but since it was a weekend, it should be an easy ride down to NYC. So much for figuring. First and foremost, I actually felt like staying there… could be because I had brought a bout of very Seattle-esque weather to the state… seems that before I had landed there was a two week stretch where the high was 35 degrees. While I was there, there was no sleet, one flurry, and 40-50 degree temps. I also went for a few days at a time without checking email or blogs – this is not a normal thing during the holidays, so that was off too. My parents are in a new house now, so that familiarity was gone, but they were so close to the house I was staying, they were very accessible… I can’t explain the feeling and I’m not going to try, but being back in WA felt weird for the first time in… well, for the first time, ever. Every time I’ve been back to WA since my first visit in 1995, it’s felt like putting on a very comfortable and warm sock.
Conversely, I left CT to get to JFK at 1:30. That gave me 90 minutes to go about 60 miles, the majority of which was either highway or airport highway, getting me to the car rental return at 3pm – meaning that I’d have two hours to get on the plane. For what it’s worth, this is the same airport and the same route that I took when a limo service left my sister and brother-in-law stranded at their house – I made that trip in under an hour on a weekend morning so I figure this was ample time. Yeah, well… Connecticut residents, I’m not sure what you’re doing with your time, but I’m nearly 100% certain that you’ve given up and accepted that traffic currently and will always suck for you. It should be the political hot button for you, but I heard nothing about it while in state. I’ve seen no improvements to most of the roads since I left – the only two helpful highway construction projects have finished (not bad for 39 months) but no new ones have started. Yes, as you can imagine from the bitterness that I hit traffic. So much traffic that I didn’t get the car back to the rental counter until 3:40-ish. Not to mention that the only Air Train I could get to took me on a tour of JFK terminals. If I wasn’t able to use the First Class counters for bag checking and security, I would not have made it in time… and I really hate cutting things like air travel close like that – it’s one of the few things that I am very anal about: I get to the airport early, no matter what.
And on the way down, I got my last iced Dunkin’ Donuts coffee that trip. I figured I should get a medium, rather than a large, so I wouldn’t have to piss as much on the plane. What I didn’t count on was the extra time on the road. I had planned to stop for gas before I hit NY – since I was in traffic on 95 from Exit 17 to Exit 2, I didn’t do this – this cut an available bathroom outta the loop. Add to that the extra time on the road? Yeah. Well. If you happened to be in NY, heading southbound on i-95 and saw a silver Trailblazer on the side of the road near exit 16 it was some other guy pissing into a once empty coffee cup. Wasn’t me.
At least the dumb weak-bladdered bastard kept the piss off his pants and had the decency to dump the cup out long before returning the rental car.
Update: Looks like you *can* get the 30-sec skip ahead bit after all… there’s a hack that sets it up, that I got off Searching around… while watching Live TV press Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. This will change the ->| button to jump ahead 30 seconds each press. Works fine with the Harmony 880 remote as well.