PS, DirectTV
If you are going to get Cable TV + TiVo, I also like Direct TV's all digital TiVo. Direct TV isn't perfect either, but like mobile phones and airlines, you have to judge them against their peers. Which is using a limbo stick for hurdles, but whatever.
From a technology point of view, using TiVo with a pre-compressed signal has important quality advantages - analog TiVo's have to digitize on the fly, and don't do nearly as good a job even with the Best Quality setting. Digital cable signals were compressed before they got to your wall plug, by big iron sitting in front of the satellite uplink. All the TiVo has to do is stream it to your hard drive. The quality is DVD-ish at an hour per GB.
Second, dual tuners rock.
Third, TiVo still sweeps all other DVR's before it. Except for the lamentations of their women, it is what Conan the Barbarian thinks is good in life.
From a technology point of view, using TiVo with a pre-compressed signal has important quality advantages - analog TiVo's have to digitize on the fly, and don't do nearly as good a job even with the Best Quality setting. Digital cable signals were compressed before they got to your wall plug, by big iron sitting in front of the satellite uplink. All the TiVo has to do is stream it to your hard drive. The quality is DVD-ish at an hour per GB.
Second, dual tuners rock.
Third, TiVo still sweeps all other DVR's before it. Except for the lamentations of their women, it is what Conan the Barbarian thinks is good in life.
posted by Mike Beversluis at
Monday, February 27, 2006
1 Comments:
The DirectTV + TiVo is awesome, I agree. Unfortunately it is not an option with a future, as DirectTV has abandoned TiVo. And the TiVo-enabled receivers will be summarily turned off by DirectTV when they stop using their MPEG2 satellites.
Me, I'm waiting for the CableCard 2 TiVo box. It'll have 2 analog tuners, 2 HDTV tuners and 2 digital cable tuners. It remains to be seen whether they'll cap the recording to two simultaneous streams...
(Incidentally, TiVo is making a big announcement tomorrow. Hmmm.)
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Anonymous, at 01 March, 2006 20:16
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