How good is Tivo's quality?

[iamme]

When you play it back does it look exactly like the original broadcast? I know there are quality settings....what do each look like?

Also, is there any way to get the digital capture to your PC?

 

[RossMAN]

I'm not sure how TIVO works (since it sucks) but on my ReplayTV there's 3 different quality levels.

Low - 30 hours, Medium - 20 hours, High - 10 hours

I'm considering hacking my ReplayTV and replacing the HD with an 80GB hard drive to expand it's recording capacity.

 

[mpitts]

TiVO does not suck. I love it.

As for the quality, you can adjust it. I have mine set to high and it is basically indistinguishable from the broadcast.

 

[Murphyrulez]

Tivo does not suck. ReplayTV does not suck. I have had both, now I have Tivo.

On the Tivo, I use the medium quality setting. If you use low, when there is any fast action on screen, you will see the compression blocks. You still see a little on medium, but very rarely. On high you wouldn't see any. I have 120 gigs hacked into mine, and medium quality gives me about 80 hours of record space...

 

[RossMAN]

Originally posted by: Murphyrulez
Tivo does not suck. ReplayTV does not suck. I have had both, now I have Tivo.

On the Tivo, I use the medium quality setting. If you use low, when there is any fast action on screen, you will see the compression blocks. You still see a little on medium, but very rarely. On high you wouldn't see any. I have 120 gigs hacked into mine, and medium quality gives me about 80 hours of record space...

Which make/model HD are using, was it difficult to hack?

 

[diskop]

How much are these babies costing these days?

 

[iamme]

so is there some sort of hack to download the TV episodes to your PC?

 

[Murphyrulez]

Originally posted by: RossMAN

Originally posted by: Murphyrulez
I have 120 gigs hacked into mine, and medium quality gives me about 80 hours of record space...

Which make/model HD are using, was it difficult to hack?

I put in an 80gig Maxtor and a 40gig Maxtor. It took a total of about 6 hours, but most of that was waiting for the info from the old small drive to copy to the big drive.

This is the method I used, http://pvrhack.sonnik.com/tivo/dylans.asp

Just create a boot disk from that page, pull all your windows drives off your IDE bus, hook up the small drive that came with the Tivo as the master, the new BIG drive as the slave, and follow the directions from that page, pretty simple. About 5 minutes of stuff you have to do, and 6 hours waiting for the copy. I've heard there's faster ways to copy, but I did it the slow way cause I didn't want to mess it up...

 

[MrBond]

Originally posted by: iamme
so is there some sort of hack to download the TV episodes to your PC?

No. If you want to do that, it'd be WAY cheaper to go with snapstream and a TV tuner card.

 

I have DirectTiVo, I don't think it compresses at all. It came with 30 hours, I added another HD (simple to do) and it does 88 hours.

 

[TerryMathews]

Originally posted by: dwell
I have DirectTiVo, I don't think it compresses at all. It came with 30 hours, I added another HD (simple to do) and it does 88 hours.

Well... DirecTiVo just captures the DirecTV data stream (Which is MPEG2) and regurgitates it on demand by passing it though a MPEG2 decoder chip to convert it to analog video. In the simplest terms, it's a HD between DirecTV and your TV set with a little glue logic in-between. This is far different than a standalone TiVo that has to record analog video, so it has it's own MPEG2 encoder and decoder chips (The encoder chip is, by necessity, of far less quality than the one DirecTV uses to encode all of their video).

 

[charliebrown]

Just ordered a Panasonic Showstopper from half.com - can't wait for it to get here. I decided for Replay over Tivo because there's no fee for the subscription service. First thing I'm going to do is hack a 120gb drive into it... then I can become a full time couch potato.