General TiVo Questions

[Thegonagle]

If you have a 2-drive model (or any model that supports two drives), the BIOS/Tivo OS will recognize two drives of up to 137 GB each. So, while a single 250 GB drive would only be recognized as 137 GB, two drives can be used for a total recognized capacity of 274 GB.

It's really easy to do if you can DL and burn a boot CD, and follow easily available directions. You can even copy all your programs and settings, but this takes several hours, and you'll be without your PC during this time. (So print out those directions before you take down your PC to copy/configure the Tivo drives!)

I've upgraded my Tivo twice now. The first time, the original 30 GB drive started to fail, so I upgraded to a single 60 GB drive. The second time, I wanted more capacity, and the 60 GB Maxtor's whine had become very loud, so I got a hot deal on two 120 GB Seagates, copied everything, and popped them both in the Tivo. For the past year now, I've had a virtually silent 298 hour Tivo! (But I usually save in high quality now, so I really only have room for about 133 hours. That's OK though, because it's an older, slower Series 1 Tivo, and the "Now Playing" list takes too long to pop up if there are too many programs stored. 133 hours at high quality is more than enough for me.)
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Wow! After typing all of the above, I started browsing at 9th Tee. There's a lot of new stuff out there. Hacks galore! And that new (semi-new?) cache/ethernet card that accepts 512 MB of RAM looks awesome. Shoot! More crap to buy, more distractions. Must. . . Resist. . . Temptation.

 

[CFster]

While regular Series 2 Tivos have networking capability, DirecTivos (Series 2) don't. They have a network plug in the back but it hasn't been enabled, and as far as I know nobody has been able to hack it yet.

The advantage DirecTivos have over a regular Tivo is recording quality. Since it's a DirecTV reciever and a Tivo in one unit, there's no analog to digital conversion going on as with any other Tivo. It's digital to digital - a direct stream copy to the hard drive. The picture is virtually identical to the satellite signal (I haven't been able to tell one iota of difference). That's also why most DirecTivo units were 35 hours - I think there's a 105hr unit out now. All recording is done in high quality, unlike other units - those other Tivos might advertise 150+ hrs, but when recording in the highest quality mode it could actually be a third of that capacity.

I have a 35hr unit that I upgraded to 105hrs with a Weeknees kit. Nice kit - comes with a hard drive, bracket, and bigger cooling fan. My unit actually runs cooler now that it has two hard drives instead of one.

Anyway, you might want to wait a little while. There's about to be an explosion of DVRs on the market.

 

[Haps]

And I will try nopt to be a die hard TIvo fanatic but Tivo is the best DVR ont he market right now IMHO. However if I could get my hand on one of the new dish network DVR's I may change my tune(dual inputs AND outputs).
But there is still a ton of room for improevement. There is a usability study put on by a couple of canadians evaluating DVR's available to us. In it the put together what thjey want in a DVR.

An interesting read with their fake menus etc. I would buy their's in a minute.

 

[RossMAN]

Haps, do you have AIM?

 

[Haps]

No