I should have know that the last thing I needed was a Tivo. I’m already a TV junkie, and the Tivo just made that much, much worse.
I bought the Humax DRT-400, which I goes for about $300. This is a Tivo Series 2 with just a 40gb hard drive, but this particular model includes a DVD recorder so programs captured by the Tivo can be burned to DVD (like many consumer DVD recorders, it only accepts DVD-Rs for some reason). The presence of a DVD recorder was crucial for me — I wanted a way to quickly and easily get programs off the Tivo. You can — and I have — add the Tivo to a home network, and from there transfer files to a PC and burn them to a DVD, but that’s a few more steps than I wanted to do on a regular basis.
I’ve been hearing people rave about the Tivo interface for years, and I was amazed. I expected to find the sort of glitches and design problems that seem to plague consumer electronics, but the interface is a thing of beauty. Subscribing to every episode of a show so I don’t miss a single episode of “The Life and Times of Juniper Lee” was a snap. So was searching through listings for that favorite childhood episode of “Buck Rogers.”
I can also look for programs based on a keyword search. For example, I’ve got a recent thing for pirates, so I’ve set up a keyword search that shows me all programs that have the word “pirate” in the title or description. Its not perfect since its a straight text search — for example, a show that used the term “buccaneer” was not highlighted since it didn’t meet the search term. I’ve got about a dozen of these search terms that I check a couple times a week.
I was less impressed with the Tivo Suggestions feature, wherein Tivo tries to guess what you might like to watch based on what you’ve watched before. But then, my habits and interests are so quirky, these sort of suggestion systems never work for me. And there are so many other ways to drill down to find hours of TV to record, that I rarely check out Tivo’s suggestions.
As I mentioned, recording those programs to DVD was essential for my purposes, and the DVD burning process is pretty much flawless. The interface does a good job of walking the user through the process of selecting which program to use, title the DVD and burn. Tivo does a very good job with the menu system it creates. I’m used to DVD recorders that add ugly-looking block text menu to their DVDs. The Tivo uses the same fonts and graphics from its interface a on the DVDs, which is leaps and bounds beyond most other DVD recorders I’ve used.
If a program is too big to fit on a single DVD-R, the recorder does a very good job of indicating how many parts the program has to be split into and letting the user pick which parts to save to DVD.
The other advantage of the Humax Tivo with the DVD recorder is the ability to record video such as from a video camera to the Tivo and then burn it to a DVD. I use this for largely for one of my obsessions — recording in-game video from my computer. Thanks to the Humax Tivo, I now have dozens of DVDs of my WoW character adventuring (i.e., dying over and over).
Finally, the Tivo Series 2 can be connected to a network. The box only has USB ports, so you have to use a USB Ethernet setup. I bought a cheap Linksys USB Ethernet connector, plugged it into my network and everything worked without any configuration on my part (other than telling the Tivo to use DHCP). As I mentioned before, you can transfer files from the Tivo to the PC, but I doubt I’ll ever do that. Instead, I installed it primarily to play music and show pictures stored on my PC through the Tivo. That worked okay. The picture playing feature worked as I expected, but I was annoyed that with the music feature I couldn’t set the system up to play my music in the background while I scheduled programs, etc. If you want to play music, you have to stick with the music playing screen. That’s sort of pointless on a box with so many different options and things to do.
Otherwise, the only real downside to the Tivo is paying $300 for the box and then still having to pay a $12.99/month subscription fee. So far, though, the fee is more than worth it. This is easily the best gadget I have ever owned.