If you haven’t been following my television equipment journey, I purchased a new TiVo a couple months ago. I had been struggling with this decision for a while and took a circuitous route to get there. Some time ago I was lamenting that my then current TiVo could only record one channel at a time. And we all know that just doesn’t suffice. I had a recordable dvd player that had replaced my final vhs recorder but it was time to take the next step.

I loved my TiVo and I loved the lifetime service that I had gotten with it, unfortunately it’s not transferable from one box to another. I weighed the costs of a new box and new monthly service against the monthly rental of a Comcast box, the phrase penny wise, pound foolish comes to mind when I reflect back on my decision. I should note that I was also at that time finally going to pay for cable and figured if they were already coming out it was worth a risk free month to month trial.

The problems started immediately but I can sum them up by touting my favorite feature about my new TiVo. It does not malfunction when I set it to record a show. Pretty fancy stuff, right? The Comcast dvr was so problematic that it wasn’t the interface issues that caused me to revolt, it was my desire to see the shows that I wanted to record.

So now that I’m back what else do I heart about my TiVo:

• Ffwd/Rwd – Hit the buttons and it lands where you meant it to land without a weird jump, I missed that.
• Incredible storage – You get what you pay for, but knowing that I can record all of the stuff I generally watch in a week, plus piling up a couple series that I can get behind on, and seeing it still at 15% makes me happy… come vacation, tennis tournaments, or Olympics I feel like I’ll be in good shape.
• Other services – This is available on other stuff besides TiVo but I’m now streaming my Netflix with no effort, plus I have access to Amazon, Blockbuster, and Pandora among others.
• Advanced guide – I use my guide, the search capabilities, and the episode displays as a constant research tool and the advanced features on the guide are great, did I miss an episode, let me just check the episode guide.
• Episodes to go – So I don’t quite have this working yet but you can download shows from your TV to your computer and watch wherever you want.

I’m still playing with it so there could be more fun to be had. Though to be fair there were a couple things that I liked a little better on Comcast:

• On Demand – I could probably still get a box but the additional shows were a nice option in addition to stuff I recorded.
• Picture in Picture – The transition from small to full screen was just smoother on my old Comcast, for whatever reason.
• Recording shows in guide – The old guide showed right in it that it was something being recorded (now I seem to have to select the show to tell).
• Not recording shows in to do list – The old guide also clearly showed what items weren’t being recorded due to conflicts, but the TiVo shows each episode not being recorded including those that are duplicates or repeats (if my setting is to not record them) which makes it difficult to weed through what I’m really going to be missing.

And here’s what I want next:

• All online video – I can watch shows for free on network and cable sites and on sites like Hulu, it would be great to have that all centralized instead of returning to my computer, all in good time I assume.
• Ability to delete part of a recording – This goes back to the recording long shows, shouldn’t you be able to delete part of it, though I suppose now that I have so much storage it doesn’t matter.
• Record more shows – And of course I’d like to record more than two shows, darn it if I don’t still have conflicts that make me sacrifice a recording.

So the TiVo will soon be out of date with the latest technology, and tech will always leave me wanting more… But for now I am delighted to return to see TiVo’s little smiling face.

I’d been wanting to upgrade from my classic TiVo to something that could record more than one channel at a time but sometimes I wonder whether progress was made. I had initially purchased TiVo with the lifetime service so the box I had was basically free. I did some research and finally decided that since I had to have the cable guy come out anyhow, I’d try out the dvr that comes from the cable company with a no risk monthly fee instead of throwing down for another TiVo which would entail the price of the box plus a monthly or lifetime service cost. I do enjoy being able to record more than one channel but it’s a wonder to find how much better the interface and service were on the TiVo.

• General Viewing – The very first thing I noticed when moving to the new dvr is the janky functionality on the ffwd and rwd. The TiVo was in tune with the timing of the speed of each so that once you hit play it would start playing where you wanted it to (playing with a slight adjustment to the location, with in effect a little bit of a jump, but so smooth you barely noticed). The new dvr actually started skipping in the wrong direction, I was missing entire scenes. They seem to be working on this because now it starts to play and then jumps back part of the way, sometimes, I think, it’s still annoying and I’m still missing scenes when I ffwd/rwd. And sometimes of course it won’t stop when I hit play, even though the play symbol is shown it keeps in ffwd until I pause or hit rwd and then play. Another occasional issue is the audio, sometimes when I turn on the dvr the audio is muted, this is typically fixed by turning it off then on again, unfortunately I can’t do this while it’s recording so I guess no watching tv with audio until my recordings stop. Fun right?
• Search – I will say that Comcast just did an update on this and you can now search by keyword! Previously you could only search by exact title and the most you could put in 5 characters, I missed this feature a lot from TiVo. TiVo’s is obviously still much better but being able to search for ‘tennis’ for example and get women’s and men’s and Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day, well I’d say genius if this function weren’t so basic. Their menu for search is a mess but at least you can figure it out, and you can delete previously saved searches which for some reason you couldn’t do before. The other thing that bugs me is that if you search for a show and select it in the menu, and the show happens to be current it will take you to that channel instead of going to info (or at least maybe asking if you want to go) which is particularly annoying if you don’t even get that channel (see Guide below).
• Record – As noted the big reason to upgrade (or downgrade) was the ability to record more than one show at a time but a few of the features are still a little wonky. If two shows are already set for a time and you try to record a third it won’t display both shows that are in conflict, it will only show the single show that it deems a conflict (it seems to stick to the rec1 or rec2 system). It will also change the channel if you are watching something and it’s time to record which makes sense if you’re recording two things but no sense if you’re only recording one (you can then go back and change the live channel). I have also had tons of recording errors where the show either only gets partially recorded (but typically displays as a full hour of recording) or records for hours and hours (and typically displays as a partial recording so it does try to record again, this can bloat the storage quickly and delete oldest shows). The season pass also tends to record a show again and again if you have watched and deleted the show, TiVo remembered what I had recorded already even if I deleted it (plus on TiVo it was nice that you had the option to store your deleted files for some time). And with TiVo the manual recordings had more features, for example I could do a recurring recording by time for something like the NewsHour which I only save one of, rather than it recording the show at multiple times.
• Guide – Well the guide isn’t bad, but the TiVo has other view options, I was into the version where you could see several channels of the current showing and then when you were on a specific channel it would show future times in more detail. I do miss the ability to view prior to the current hour, I wouldn’t have thought much about this but apparently I do sometimes want to scroll back in time to see what was on or if I missed something. And there’s the fact that one would think that if I was getting my dvr through my cable company that there would be the ability to only display the channels that I get, instead of showing every possible channel (1-999), I mean TiVo had the option to select ‘basic’ service for ‘Comcast’ by location and then you could of course customize what channels you wanted to display, which I assume is not just that I can’t find on this version.
• On Demand – As a benefit to the switcharoo I did get access to OnDemand service which is actually pretty nice. For the channels that I get there are many shows that are available for some time whenever I want, which particularly comes in handy if there’s a time slot that I’m overbooked on, I don’t know about a show, or some snafoo happens with my recording (which clearly happens more often than I would like). What would be great though is the knowledge as to what will be available. If a show is already going you can usually discern whether it’s listed or not, how soon after airing it shows up, how many episodes they keep at a time and how frequently they expire. But I’d rather not have to discern and of course if a show is just starting out there’s no way to know for sure whether it will be included so one tends to not want to count on it. And it would be nice if I could record two shows and watch OnDemand simultaneously but that might just be greedy. And you can pay for new release movies and stuff which so far I haven’t sampled, it’s certainly not a Netflix replacement for me for example.
• Remote Control – This is a little petty but I don’t know how many times I’ve hit ‘All On’ to turn on or off and the delay to turn off the tv is so long that if you move the remote control it won’t turn off. I miss the peanut TiVo remote.

The other main issue is the general box. I had to go through three different units before they got everything to work. Each time losing recorded shows, season pass programming, and having to repopulate the guide (which takes forever). Though annoying it was mostly forgivable, what’re less so are the ongoing issues. For me it’s the infrequent losing of the guide and the occasional losing of my manual recordings when that happens (season passes seem to repopulate). What’s beyond unforgivable is that someone else I know had all of their recorded shows and recording options deleted after a system ‘upgrade.’

It might just be inertia but I’m trying to be patient hoping the next big thing will come out and/or prices will come down before I clear off yet another box and make my way to the next one. I am also admittedly kind of a cheapskate when it comes to television I hate the idea of more monthly fees and buying a box that will become outdated with what seems like greater and greater frequency. Though loss of critical shows through another dvr recording meltdown might push the issue.