TiVo TCD540040 (160 GB) 175-Hours DVR

First of all, let me say that the description on this product is incorrect. This model number (540040) is a 40 hour model, not 175! The stock photo is correct.

This review was written over the course of nearly 4 weeks, starting a week before Christmas up to now, after almost 3 weeks of actual use. If I repeat myself or if ideas overlap, I apologize. A lot of time was spent trying to cover it all.

Anyway, I purchased this toy for my wife as a Christmas gift. My wife has her favorite television shows that she hates to miss and playing with/forgetting to set and incorrectly setting the VCR has become a regular ritual around our house.

I did a lot of research before making the decision to get it because I wanted to make sure I understood fully how it worked and whether it would really be better than a new vcr/recordable dvd.

One of the things I found out from my research is that you *MUST HAVE* a standard, old-fashioned telephone line in order to setup the device "initially." At our house, we don't have such a phone line, because we use Vonage (which I reviewed here once-upon-a-time: http://www.epinions.com/content_153728224900). I called Tivo tech support, and within 5 minutes had a live person answering my questions. According to tech support, you only needed a telephone line for the initial setup, which they said would take about an hour. After that, a telephone line would never again be required. (Not exactly true: more on that later). I was told that VOIP (Vonage) might or might not work, but not to get my hopes up. Fair enough.

I purchased the device and brought it home to see whether I could set it up in advance, so that my wife could simply plug & play on Christmas morning, rather than facing a potential installation problem due to the phone line.

At first, all was fine. The device and its cables were wrapped & packaged very nicely, the instructions for making all the necessary connections were clear and concise. They included big diagrams and cables for every situation (infrared or serial control of your cable box, red/yellow/white RCA cables for right/video/left connections).

I connected everything, waited for the system to boot, answered all the on-screen questions about my zip code, area code, my email address, our cable provider, etc. No problems until it tried to dial into their service to retrieve local phone numbers. It would not connect over my Vonage line and after about a dozen attempts I gave up. I went to a neighbors house to "borrower" their phone line and television for an hour. (Thank goodness for Christmas-spirit). This is where my nightmare really began.

The first dial-in went smoothly, and as planned. The screen said it would take a few minutes and it did. We connected, downloaded, processed, etc. Eventually, when I thought we were done, I was presented with another "download" screen. It said it would take 20-30 minutes, and my neighbor agreed it was OK to continue playing. About an hour later, I called Tivo to make sure that nothing was wrong. The tech assured me that it was "normal" to take more than an hour. Since it was late, he suggested we simply let it sit overnight and return in the morning. My neighbor, ready for bed, was OK with that and let me leave my mess of wires & such in their living room.

When I returned the next morning, I was surprised at the message on screen. It told me that it needed me to press "select" and it would take approximately 4 – 8 hours to process the information it downloaded last night. 4 – 8 HOURS MORE. I called Tivo to confirm this step was necessary, or whether I could simply unplug the device and continue the project at my own home. I was advised NOT to unplug it now or face starting over from the beginning. My neighbor was not too happy, but agreed to allow me to keep the device plugged-in for the afternoon. At least I was able to remove the connection to his phone line and he was able to watch television while the device did its thing.

I went back later & picked up everything, thanked my neighbor, & went home to wrap the gift when it occurred to me that if the initial phone calls would not work, I might also have trouble connecting to the system for regular, scheduled updates. I decided to setup again at my house to give it a whirl, but quickly determined that it would still not connect on a Vonage line. I called Tivo to ask why they claim a phone line was required ONLY for the initial setup when obviously, the device would need to connect again occasionally. They explained that after the initial setup, subsequent connections could be made via my home network.

My home network? What if I didn't have a home network? They don't tell you that you will need a standard phone line *OR* a home network – lucky for me I actually have a home network. Others may not be so lucky!

Ok, so how to connect the device to my home network? I was told by tech support I had to buy a USB network adapter. Great, an extra expense. They have a list of "approved" and "not approved – but confirmed working" adapters on their website. I found one of the "confirmed working" wireless adapters for sale at Best Buy for $30, so I called tech support again to confirm that the adapter I was about to purchase would work. DEFINITELY, was the response I got, so off to Best Buy I went.

I spent 30 minutes on line at Best Buy (less than a week to Christmas) but that's another story, but was able to get the adapter and brought it home to finish my setup. Not.

The Tivo did not seem to recognize the adapter having been plugged in, and the setup menu did not even have an option for "network" settings. Ultimately, I had to call tech support again and was told by this person that I had been misinformed earlier. The adapter I bought will, in fact, work – but only if your tivo is running version 7.0 of their software. And, guess what? My tivo was not running version 7 of their software. My tivo needed to be connected to a telephone line again if I wanted to manually force it to update to the newer version. Alternatively, I could buy an "older" wireless adapter, but I checked online and neither of the stores in my area (best buy & circuit city) carried the older models. I returned the wireless adapter to Best Buy and checked their shelves just in case an older model was still being sold – no luck. I also checked (out of desperation) for a wired-adapter, but they did not carry any of them – much less any of the ones on my list.

Circuit City did not carry any of the "older" wireless adapters either, but they happened to carry one of the wired adapters on the list. It was $30, and I bought it. It actually worked and I was able to connect my tivo to my home network – luckily, my tivo will sit near the network hub – but this could be a problem for others. Anyway, at this point I could presumably use one of the wireless adapters since my Tivo was updated, but I will keep the wired adapter which is probably less prone to "interference" or connection issues anyway.

*****
ACTUAL USE – GIFT WAS GIVEN on Christmas Eve.
*****
I'll try to outline the different features in the order we noticed and learned them.

We unpacked and setup the TiVo quickly. For the initial setup I did not actually connect our cable box or test the recording features, so it was new to both of us. Setup was easy, and they provided all the necessary cables for any situation. We used the cable coax cable to connect to the cable box and the A/V (red, white, & yellow) cables to connect the cable box to TiVo and then the same type of cables from TiVo to TV. You can use svideo, too, if thats what you have on your cable box and/or television, but you'll need your own cables. During setup we had no problems.

The Guide. The default guide "view" is very nice because it displays the next several hours of programming for the channel you highlight, where the cable box guide does not. There is an option to change the view to one just like the cable box's and that's the one we have selected because of a "problem" with the default view. The background on the default view is opaque so that you can see the show you're watching behind the guide. It makes reading the guide difficult. The "standard" view has a solid blue background that makes reading MUCH easier, so we reluctantly switched to that view. There is no option to make the background solid on the default view.

Surfing through the guide to find stuff to record is easy, basically like the guide we were used to using with our cable box. You can simply press the record button when you find something you want to record and then you can choose to record "episode only" or "season pass," (record all the shows as they come up) if applicable. You can even name the channels you receive (as opposed to all the channels your provider offers) as well as the channels you consider your favorites. From the menu, you can tell the tivo to display "all" channels, those you receive, or only your favorites. I like showing all my favorites, because there are only about 20 channels in my tv guide.
Channels you're not interested in can be skipped, thus saving space in the guide and ensuring tivo won't suggest (and record)things that absolutely won't interest you. More on that later.

When you find something you want to record, all you have to do is hit the record button from either the tv guide, or while you're watching the show. Tivo keeps track (is recording) up to 30 minutes of whatever you're watching until you change channels. This is nice so that if you like the way a show or a movie starts, you can decide to record the entire program up to 30 minutes into it.

You can decide what quality to record in to make more or less space available. The default quality-setting is used, but you can change it for each program on a case-by-case basis. I have found that "basic" is fine for black & white programs like the Twilight Zone, Medium is better for sitcoms, and "best" for sporting events with lots of high speed motion.

Each setting will yield you more or less storage space, so that you can record four times as much at the lowest quality than the highest.

While you're watching television, in case you did not realize, you can literally PAUSE live television. The machine is always recording, and always has up to 30 minutes of what you've been watching (until you change channels) recorded. You can literally pause and rewind (up to 30 minutes) if you like and you can also record a program from it's beginning even if you've watched up to 30 minutes of it BEFORE hitting record. This amazes us! If I'm watching something that I think my wife would like, I an decide to record it even after I've watched up to 30 minutes of it.

Season Pass & Wishlist. When you record a show from either the show or from the tv guide, you'll always get the option to record the season. From within that menu you can choose "first run only" "repeats" or a combination of both. Once set, you'll never have to worry about missing a show on your season pass. Wishlist is even better. It's like having a search engine for your tv guide. You can search an actor, a keyword, a title, or just about anything. Once set, the tivo will find and record anything containing the search term. For example, I set a wish list for "Peter Sellers." A few days later I had a Pink Panther movie and a couple other movies starring Peter Sellers. Similarly, a wishlist for "Bob Newhart" yielded a talk show that Newhart appeard on recently, as well as an episode of a blooper show that he was on. Pretty cool.

I've already used the online scheduling several times. From another computer (at work, or a friend's house, for example) you can pick a show to record and set it up to happen from the internet. If you're networked (like me) your tivo checks the website every hour for new events you might have scheduled. I think dialup users get updated once or twice a day, but I am unsure. A nicer way to go happens to be via yahoo.com, if you're interested. I found their tv guide to be more intuitive and more like a regular tv guide (than the one offered by tivo on their website) and after a short (and free) registration I was able to use yahoo's tv guide to control and schedule my tivo from the internet. Your tivo will even email you once it receives the command to record your show to acknowledge it's scheduled.

View your home photos & listen to your mp3's. You simply install a server software on any computer on your network that hosts your photos and music, and with very little firewall tinkering you're able to browse photos & listen to your music. The interface is not great, and searching through dozens of folders (like I have) takes time. I have a networked dvd player (govideo, networked here: http://www.epinions.com/content_138384346756) and a network media player (netgear, reviewed here: http://www.epinions.com/content_183157165700) that each do a much better job and make searching for music/photos much easier, but the tivo is MUCH better than nothing. Had I nothing to compare it to I would not complain.

Tivo to go. You can copy your recordings to a computer via the network and then watch them (on your notebook, for example) or burn DVDs for viewing anywhere. I did not purchase the add-on software for dvd burning, but I have copied several programs to my computer and experimented with that.. it works very nicely. The quality is perfect, even at full screen, and at the medium quality, a 30 minute show (I downloaded a bunch of twilight zones after New Year's Day) takes an average of 500,000 k (half gig). Hour shows are about a full gig, but don't forget you can lower the quality if you want to save space, but my notebook has lots of space for a few movies or tv shows "on the go." Also, I would imagine (but do not really know for sure) you should be able to use windows media player to convert the video to a smaller size if you really wanted to.

We're hooked, plain & simple. Even when something we want to watch is actually on, we'll watch something previously recorded. Why? So we can skip commercials. There are about 3 or 4 minutes of commercials every few minutes (20 minutes per hour) on television. Not watching commercials *((trimming 10 minutes from each half hour broadcast) lets us watch 3 half hour shows per hour (no exaggeration). How cool is that?

While we watch television (live or recorded) we push the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons (up to three of either up or down) to let tivo know what shows we like or don't like either a little or a lot. Then tivo starts to make decisions in its "off time" as to what to record for us that it thinks we might like, based on previous decisions. So far, it's not suggested anything spectacular, and has suggested some things we knew we would not like, but we're hopeful that it will get better at making suggestions. From what we've seen it's getting better and the suggestions at least make sense to us.

The tivo is supported by a strong following at www.tivocommunity.com. There you can find the answers to any questions and find out how to do just about anything you would want to do, including undocumented tricks & "upgrades." There, I found out how to turn the "catch up" button on the remote (which is supposed to bring you back to the "current" or live position if you've paused or rewound live tv) into a 30 second skip forward button, perfect for skipping right over commercials.

Email me specific questions and I will do my best to answer them. I'll update this review if I find new things I missed, or if anyone askes more questions.