Mostly Harmless

So, anywho, I ordered a TiVo doohickey last Sunday from these guys. It got here on Wednesday and I’ve been trying to keep up with it ever since.

I went for the Sony SVR-3000 ‘cuz it has a better remote and it’s a bit nicer than the run of the mill TiVo unit and when you get it from Hi-Tech Essentials it’s actually cheaper than the regular 80-hour TiVo. There’s also a $50 rebate until April 30th. Unfortunately, for you, the lifetime subscription price is going up $50 to $299, right… about… now.

I think the Sony has more CPU horsepower, because it said the initial indexing of the TV schedule would take 4-8 hours but it only took one hour. I started doing the setup at 7:30 and it was ready to go by 9pm.

It also has this ominous blue cyclops light when it’s turned on, which is cool… or at least ominous.

Let us explore the wonders of TiVo, shall we?

Here’s how to tell if your TiVo is recording: If the unit is on, and there is a red light, it is recording. If the unit is on, and there is no red light, it is recording. If the unit is off, and there are no lights, it is recording. The only difference being that if there is a red light, it is recording a specific show — no red light means it is buffering whatever channel you left it on, even if you’re watching something it recorded previously. The “TiVo suggestions” feature will cause it to record shows willy-nilly, after a while you can weed out the crap and most of these suggestions will be shows you might actually want to see (I’m still working on that though.)

There’s a statistic on the TiVo site that says “xx% of TiVo owners don’t watch live TV” (I ain’t gonna look for it, but ‘xx’ was pretty high.) I figure the reason is that, after a few days, there will be so much stuff recorded that you will never be able to watch it all. I’ve had mine for 4 days and already there are at least 20 hours of programming recorded on it (after I’ve deleted 15 hours), with 40+ more hours purposely scheduled by me over the next 12 days (with ‘Season Passes’), and 60+ hours of suggestions it will record if those don’t overlap with my scheduled stuff. So, you see, it’s very easy to load it up with 50 hours of TV per week — I may need to take some vacation time in order to watch it all.
The insidious thing is that it will keep recording while you are watching pre-recorded shows. You may think that you’re catching up, but noooo, it’s recording more stuff on the sly. Your only hope is go nuts with the fast forward button. My model has 3x, 18x, and 60x searching. Let me just say you can get through commercials and boring parts of movies very quickly at 60x (at 18x you can almost follow the story). 3x will still let you use Closed Captioning, so you can watch and read most shows.

One of the “problems” is that it has 10-12 days worth of the TV schedule, and it’s very easy to sift through that. You’d be amazed at how many showings there are of some shows every week. I’ve been missing Futurama for months, for instance, but now that I’ve got a Season Pass the TiVo is snagging every showing no matter when or where it airs, so now I get an episode a day. I’ve also seen about 6 episodes of South Park, which I had a tendency to miss. And I swear that it’s pulling shows from channels I didn’t even know I had — or at least, channels that I used to ignore completely. Who knew that they were gonna air something interesting at 2am nine days from now? (Thanks to TiVo, you do!)

The video quality is pretty decent, you learn to ignore the MPEG artifacts. The High Quality setting is a fair sight better than my usual EP recording. Actually Medium is just as good as EP. High Quality will get you 40 hours of available space, Medium is 50-something, Best is 24-ish, and Basic is 80+ hours of low-res junk (I assume, I haven’t ventured below Medium yet).

“Live TV” is a phrase that will soon fade from my memory, I suspect. You can watch TV live, and it will buffer it so you can rewind and pause, but you’ll want to always be behind real-time so you can fast forward the commercials. e.g. I started watching “Alias,” from the beginning, 25 minutes after it started so I could blow past the commercials.

You can’t watch one channel while the TiVo is recording a different channel, unless you split your signal, but you can still watch pre-recorded shows. You won’t want to watch live TV anyway ‘cuz it’s evil. You don’t need to channel surf, either, because you can easily browse the schedule of all the other channels without leaving the channel you’re on — and if there’s a show on in the future you just set it to record and forget about it, when you come back you can blitz through it.

One of the neat things is that there is a whole lot of stuff you can do while it’s recording a show. You can watch some of the many hours of recorded shows, you can browse the live TV schedule, you can go spelunking through the schedule and queue up a crap load of programs to be recorded over the next 10-12 days, or you can tweak the suggestions so stuff that you like gets recorded. I spent about an hour on Saturday digging through a big list of every movie showing in the next couple of weeks, giving some the “Thumbs Up” so they’ll probably get snagged automatically, or specifically recording some, like “Office Space” next Tuesday at 2pm on Comedy Central (Woo! Just saved $20 on a DVD).

I’m not sure what the official TiVo slogan is, but here’s an alternate I thought up after having one for just a few days:

“TiVo: Make TV Your Bitch”

Kinda says it all, yes?