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I have an older Philips DirecTV receiver with Tivo, and I think its on its last legs. I google'd it and apparently this particular model does dissipate heat very well. It's been overheating and rebooting itself almost every 5 minutes.
Anyone else a Tivo freak like me? We have 26 season passes (shows we actually watch). I went through that list and there was actually nothing I was willing to get rid of! Tivo is one of those things that when you describe it to other people, you sound very cultish. Tivo people are rabid about it!!
Thank god that DirecTV dude is coming over tomorrow with a brand new Series-2 receiver (took advantage of their $99 deal). Gonna go straight to Best Buy and stick another monster hard drive in the sucker.
Have you been feeding your TIVO properly? Try feeding it an old Canon 2-megapixel digi-cam
__________________ Disclaimer: No claim is made that the quality of the MINI-related advice offered by Yucca Patrol
is greater than the quality of MINI-related advice offered by other NAM members.
i can guarantee you you'll find more info on your model (and anything else TIVO-related) in minutes. there are over 57,000 members on that site!
(sidenote: curious what kind of server(s) they have running as the site is extremely fast [running vbulletin] and handles hundreds of visitors at a time)
Is this more common than I think? Who else intentionally watches 20+ hours a week of particular scheduled shows?
We don't have 26 hours, but we have a lot. TV is serious business in our house!
TiVo:
Las Vegas
Airline
Frasier
Law and Order SVU
The West Wing
Enterprise
Law and Order
Friends
Survivor
Law and Order Criminal Intent
King of the Hill
Crossing Jordan
Coupling (BBC, should Series 4 finally come out)
Ultimate TV:
The Apprentice
Airport
We have one last TiVo that is currently not taping anything becuase I haven't sat down to get it to work with the stereo system and HDTV receiver... Like I said, we take our TV seriously!
For those of you who don't have TiVo especially because you already have a VCR.... Don't think of TiVo as a modern VCR, it gives you much more freedom than a VCR, espciailly if you have a DirecTiVo (a TiVo with 2 DirecTV receivers built in)
OK all you TIVO folk, here's a question that I haven't found answered. It represents the main barrier between me and the supposed life-altering wonders of TIVO...
I know that you can generally skip commercials when watching a TIVO playback, but (here's the question) is it possible to record programs from the TIVO (onto tape, DVD, etc.) that LEAVE OUT the commercials? My goal is to create a library of programs with the commercials edited out. I don't want to have to manually skip the commercials each and every time I watch the show. Plus, I doubt that commercial skipping works particularly well when playback is coming from a source other than the hard drive.
I'm a perfect case for TIVO's market barriers. I consider myself a fairly techno-savvy guy, but somehow TIVO brings in a whole other/new level of technical detail to what was heretofore a basic, mindless, task. Somehow, that just creates brain-freeze in me. But the possibility of making any TV program commercial free (particularly useful when there are little kids in the house who already know WAY too much about Disneyworld and McDonalds :evil: ) is pretty darn enticing.
however, if you had oodles of time, you could burn to DVD, hop on your computer and load up the DVD file and edit out the commercials. well, maybe...
Supposedly HD-TIVO is being released in two weeks. I think Directivo is going to offer the first model. I have a few clients anxiously waiting for that email from me saying it's available so that I can install it for them.
I think the way Tivo is explained might be a little confusing. What Tivo does when you're watching Live TV is that it's always buffering the previous half hour of television. You switch channels, you lose the buffered time.
That's how you can "rewind" live television.
The whole notion of skipping commercials is confusing too. If you're watching live TV, you can't skip commercials, because you can't make Tivo jump forward in time.
If youre watching a pre-recorded item, you can forward through it. The fact that you're forwarding through commercials is arbitrary, you can forward/rewind through anything just like a VCR.
However, here's the good stuff. Remember how I said that Tivo is always buffering a half hour's worth of TV?
Consider Alias, a 1 hr program. Starts at 9pm on Sunday. For the sake of assumption, let's say a 1hr show contains about 20 minutes of commercials.
If your receiver was already set to ABC, you could start watching Alias at 9:20, rewind through the buffered portion, and forward through the commercials.
You would still finish the show at 10pm, when it was originally scheduled to finish, and you skipped the commericals.
^ Yes, it does. Still seems like a lot of work and given that about the last thing I'm capable of when I finally resort to TV is "work", it's all still sort of scary. But yes, it makes sense.
Quote:
The whole notion of skipping commercials is confusing too. If you're watching live TV, you can't skip commercials, because you can't make Tivo jump forward in time.
Damn! I really wanted something that would jump forward in time.
Ok, here's my season pass list. You promised not to make fun. Bear in mind that this includes a lot of my wife's programming too, some of which I indulge in also.
Young & the Restless
Days of Our Lives
Bold & the Beautiful
Alias
24
American Idol
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
Real World
Friends
CSI
Will & Grace
Las Vegas
That 70's Show
Arrested Development
O.C.
The Apprentice
Good Day Live
On Air with Ryan Seacrest
Osbournes
Survivor
Extreme Makeover
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Sopranos
Average Joe
Heck, you don't even need to re-wind the show when you start...
Just go to your list of recorded shows and start watching, you can start watching a show from there while it's still being recorded.
There is a way to create your library of commercial free shows, but it takes some work.
TiVo specifically has an option to copy shows to a video tape (and a TiVo with a DVD burner is already on the market). At the beginning of your show it will flash a screen with the show's name and description and then play back the show. When a commercial break begins, pause your VCR, fast forward through the commercial break. At the end of the commercial break, resume your VCR and return the TiCo back to normal speed...
I could be wrong, but I think that the Dish Network HDTV/DVR is out already. I think it has 3 tuners (2 analog, 1 HD) while the soon to be released DirecTV HDTV TiVo has 4 tuners (2 analog, 2 HD). I'm not inclined to make any more changes to our A/V setup. We just got HDTV two months ago (thanks to a deal from DirectTV we got a $699 DirecTV HD receiver for $200 as an existing subscriber. Nobody at Best Buy knew anything about it, that is except their registers!)Maybe in two more years I'll look to replace some things, by then we'll have gotten some good mileage from what we have now...
Jsun, The interesting thing about Tivo has changed my viewing habits, is that I just don't watch programs anymore at their original air time. Other than sports, news, etc..
Sometime I let two episodes of 24 or Alias pile up and watch them back to back. Much better that dealing with the suspense week to week.
The other nice thing is that I have two satellite inputs coming into the same receiver. So I can Tivo two programs which air at the same time.
you can't do that.
