TiVO Series 3
After years of waiting, the HD Tivo came out in 2006. I waited until the end of the year to purchase "them". I say that as my family are such tivo addicts that we already had two with lifetime service plans, which are now a thing of the past. I wanted to preserve this for the HD TiVo service as I believed, for a long time, that HD and TiVo is the way to go. Everybody seems to really like the new box.The rationale is simple - once you go DVR you never go back..unless you have HD withtout TiVo (or decent DVR capabilties). Having HD withtout TiVo for years has been rather frustrating to say the least. I have to watch the HD live. Not a big deal on HBO, but now that most networks are broadcasting significant portions of the lineup in HD it's back to watching commercials. So naturally I was thrilled that it was avaialbe - albeit with a bit of sticker shock.
The installation involves a visit from the cable guy, which in my case was from TimeWarner in San Diego. This guy admitted he'd never done this before. In fact, when he arrived he was a bit surprised I needed 4 cable cards. The cards are from SA and have a PCMCIA form factor. Some folks have had lots of trouble with these. I was therefore expecting the worst, and have only had a few problems. First, I had Juan install the first set of cards on the upstairs Tivo with the Sony HDTV with an HDMI inteface. This was a snap. It powered up and I had it all ready for the installation. He did the cards, one at a time (you need to "authorize" the cards from the central TW office). Meanwhile, downstairs I tried to the second TiVo working. It was hung on the "just a few minutes more" page...for like 15 minutes. Naturally, I went into my office and searched messge boards and found that occasionaly you need to disconnect the wireless broadband USB connector during the boot up. Which I did and Voila! it worked.
Good news:
- After I figured out that with the component cable connection to my "old HDTV", which when purchased in 1999 was state of the art, and now, well, let's say it still works just fine. When I first started watching Discovery HD I was stunned at how lousy it looked. I had failed to simply press the small button on the front panel that toggled the output between 480i/480p/720p/1080i. Awsome picture quality!
- The Tivo picture sharing from my iPhoto library works great, as does the music sharing from iTunes
- everything else is as you would expect - just like the series 2 tivo
- One of the cable cards has "lost lock" about 3 times and I've had to reset the box. This is irritating and time consuming and I hope it does not continue. The last time the machine went into "looking for service" mode I had to call TW customer support - and it was this guys first call with a cablecard (I resisted removing the cable cards as the TiVo trouble shooting page said not to). I was told to pull the power cable, pull the cable cards, count to 30, reinstall the cable cards and plug the unit back in. That worked, but again, it took like 20 minutes to do all that.
- between my G5, the home network and the tivo service, the music/photo service seems to need restarting a lot. I have to go back to system preferences, stop the tivo service, start the tivo service, and then it works.
- you can no longer transfer between tivos (files are too big)
- you can no longer "1 button" delete a program like on the series 2 machines, and naturally there is no longer a "recently deleted" folder
Labels: tivo
