High def man has been a Comcast HD digital cable since it became available in the Seattle area. At that same time Comcast came out with their high definition DVR box from Motorola. It was slow.  It was ugly.  Fast forward several years and that box is still slow and ugly.  Unfortunate for Comcast, but fortunate for other companies to come along and make a better product.  If you’ve never seen a TiVo in action you’re missing out.  Unfortunately the word tivo has become synonomous with “DVR”, which has people calling their crappy DVR systems Tivo when in fact they are not even close.

The Setup
The TiVo Series 3 use CableCards, which allows them to record digital cable in High Definition.  Finally an alternative to the horrid Comcast box.   Depending on what service you have your cable provider may “rent” you a pair of Cable Cards for free.  Getting the cablecards setup is actually the most difficult part of the tivo installation.  As time goes on and cable companies get more experience with these devices I imagine this process will becomeeven smoother.  In my case I spent about 45 minutes on the phone with Comcast to get mine working.  They were having trouble with 1 of the CableCards not programming properly.  After that was fixed it was all smooth sailing.  The Tivo downloads program guide information and updates, which takes a while but requires no interaction.

The Basics
The heart of the Tivo and its service is of course the ability to record TV shows and completely replace your normal cable box.  It is very good at this.  By telling it what you like and what you don’t (using the thumbs up/ down buttons) it will also record stuff it think you might enjoy, which they call Tivo Suggestions. This feature did annoy me at first as it was constantly asking if it could change the channel to record a suggestion while I was watching live TV.  I haven’t seen that happen lately which means they either fixed it or I’m just never watching live tv.

Navigating the menus couldn’t be easier.  The software was created so that anybody could use it.  It even has a “Kids Zone” feature which allows you to lock down the box for child use allowing you to control precisely what they can record or watch.  The remote control has very few buttons on it compared to the otherA/V components I own.  The button layout is very nice and can be fully operated without looking after only a few days of use.

The box itself is not particularly nice looking, nor is it ugly. It features component video outputs as well as HDMI for HDTV goodness.  There are many output resolution options to choose from, 1080i fixed being my setting of choice.

New Features
Tivo recently updated the series 3 boxes to include Multi-room viewing, which is something the older devices have already had.  This also includes the ability to transfer and watch videos from your PC.  You can also copy shows off your Tivo to your PC and watch them there (TiVo to go).  Some content is protected and cannot be copied (such as shows I recorded from HBO).

The Tivo HD can hold up to 20 hours of HDTV content or 180 hours of standard definition video.  While some may think this is too small I find that it is more than enough.  You won’t have the space to keep a huge library of recorded shows on it obviously, but it should more than suffice for regular tv viewing.  If you think you’ll want more space there is also the much higher priced TiVo Series 3 which has a 300 hour capacity.  If you get the TiVo HD and later find that it indeed doesn’t have enough space they now have a 500 gbyte external drive that you can purchase for about $199 to expand your storage space.  This external hard drive more than doubles the amount of shows you can keep on your tivo at one time.

Now that they’ve added the “copy to PC” feature you can use that to make backups of content you want to keep.  Copying files to and from the PC seems to take quite a long time.  I imagine this is due to the transfers being throttled in order to avoid causing any performance degradations on the TiVo itself.

Limitations
The current tivo device is not capable of outputting 1080p resolution.  This isn’t really a problem since nobody broadcasts in 1080p anyway.

 Conclusion
I can only think of 2 reasons not to buy this HD Tivo.  The first is that you cannot afford it, and the second being that you’re a satellite subscriber.  While the device isn’t exactly cheap, it was the best thing added to my stereo stand since the HDTV itself.  Buy one, you won’t be sorry!

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