DVR Chatter

Here's some background...I have a 2 tuner Series 2 Tivo and the Motorola 6412.  Previous to the Series 2 Tivo I had a Series 1 that died on me this year.  As far as technology, I'd say my Tech Savvy is "Slightly Above Average." As a reference, I have never modded a Tivo to the point where it does extra stuff, but I have added an extra hard drive (to my original TiVo). So I'm not a "My VCR blinks 12:00" kind of guy, but I'm by no means a serious mod expert.

Series 2 TiVo does not do HD.  That's a deal breaker.  No ifs, ands or buts.  If HD were not an issue, I would highly recommend the TiVo I have with it's Home Media Options such as being able to transfer recordings to my PC and being able to transfer ANY mpeg2 recording with mp2 audio from the PC to the TiVo.

The Series 3 Tivo does do HD, but it's price is prohibitive and it does not currently do the transferring that I refer to above.  Also, you'll need a cablecard to use it for cable-based HD, which sounds like a pain in the neck especially since Comcast appears to have a vested interest in preventing you from using it or at least making it very difficult.

With TiVo, there is of course no OnDemand.

You can use your TiVo to operate your digital cable box.  I used to use my Series 1 in conjunction with a Stand Alone DirecTV box. With DirecTV, there was the option of using a Serial connection to operate the Sat Box, which worked flawlessly. I first had it hooked up using the IR blaster to operate the DirecTV box, which was spotty.

With my Series 2 TiVo, I can take recordings and put them onto the PC.  They're in TiVo proprietary format, but it's only one step (using freeware program Directshow Dump) to strip the TiVo wrapper (in just a few minutes) and convert to pure MPEG 2 for burning to DVD.

If TiVo Series 3 were more reasonably priced AND did the home media transfers AND I had no use for OnDemand, I'd have it instead of the Comcast DVR.  As it is, I cannot recommend.

If your main use will be SD recording from basic cable (non-digital), you have other ways to receive OnDemand (like multiple Comcast boxes) and you'd like to transfer recordings for conversion to DVD, I'd recommend a Series 2 TiVo.

If you mainly watch HD shows, I can't see recommending anything other than Comcast's box.

Hope this helps.

To make sure its quite clear, the Tivo HD box, the S3, will NOT control a cable box. Only the S1 & S2's do that.   With that said, even tho its quite expensive, the Tivo S3 is a really really good box. At least in my experience.

Drawbacks that Frank mentioned are certainly real.... no multi-room transfers (yet, maybe never?), no OnDemand type stuff.
Of course, the 6412 doesn't do the multi-room transfers either.  The cablecard installations were zero problems for me, but a lot of S3 users have complained that getting them working (via inept Comcast installers who were clueless about them) was a real problem. Check out the Tivo community forum for endless posts about that.

In my own setup, I have several other S2 Tivos throughout my house for multi-room transfers and I have a older 5000 series digital Comcast box for the Tivo to control for OnDemand stuff  (which I rarely use....maybe one or two times a year for unbroadcast UGA football games).  So, those deficiencies were not really a problem for me either.

The problems that finally made me plop down the big bucks for the S3 was the infuriating unreliability of the 6412 that I used for about a year.  It was so unreliable that I had to make backup Tivo copies of shows I really liked to make sure I'd actually get to watch a show I wanted, (even if it WAS on a non-hd Tivo).  The 6412 regularly missed HD shows, recorded with no sound, froze up, was pixelated, the guide was constantly losing all programming info (sometimes taking 1-2 days to reload) and when the guide lost its programming, forget about trying to use the 6412, almost nothing works until several hours of info are restored. The dual tuners in the 6412 were often conflicting with each other about shows on at the same time, even though there was no logical reason for the conflicts.  Shows would record that I had not scheduled, abandoning shows that I did want.

Few users of both Tivo & 6412's will argue the fact that Tivo has far superior interface, from season passes to wishlists, to simply searching for a program. The 6412 makes you click thru the whole alphabet for EACH letter in a search....maddening, (although that is possibly a function of which guide the 6412 utilizes. The fact that the 6412 uses several different guides never pleased me much, either).  The S3 will store almost twice as many hours of HD than the 6412, and larger drives can be user-installed on the S3s.  Supposedly, some of the Comcast boxes will allow the addition of external usb drive storage, but mine did not.

The 6412 was, for me, a great box when it was the ONLY way for me to view HD content. I loved it because I love HD.  The 6412 & S3 have equally great hd pictures.  The final straw for me was when the 6412 simply turned off, never to come back on, causing me to miss the HD versions of several season finales. Luckily, the dependable Tivos recorded the shows.

The new HD S3 Tivo lacks a few of the S2's very cool features that Frank mentioned.  It also has features that the S2s did not have....like HD dual tuners, both cable HD (x2) and over-the-air HD (x2). And beautiful HD.

My summary:  If cost is the primary factor, go with the 6412, if reliability and ease of use are the primary factors, go with the Tivo S3.  Opinions vary wildly, and each has it's merits.

well, anything Comcaustic does will only ensure they'll suck more money from you and me.  Bring on the competition.  I think ATT is laying fiber just down the road from me.

Hi folks - thanks for the replies. Sorry to post back so late; I thought I would get email notifications of the replies - didn't happen.

Well, with the latest price increases, my 2nd and 3rd DVR boxes went from 9.95 apiece to 16.90 apiece, so I called today and canceled them. The tech was able to disable the DVR function from the office and I'll keep the boxes as just HDTV digital converters. At $6 less per box monthly. As it was, those two boxes were used primarily for backup recordings, to catch "misses" of shows by the main DVR box - which I still have.

It's a shame that with all the hype about the S3 box that it is missing a lot of features that S1 and S2 had. Wonder why they did that? I have to look into the cable card issue and see if it is do-able here; price-wise, it might not be as big a hit as originally thought, with the new Comcast pricing.

BTW, that video requires a $10/month sign up to view - I didn't need to see it that much!

Thanks again!