TiVo TCD540080 (80 GB) 80-Hours DVR

Being selective TV viewers, with only a handful of programs we regularly watch, we just were never able to watch our shows and movies on the scheduled times. We had been contemplating a Tivo for a long time, having read about its possibilities, but we never had the cojones to purchase the thing. Then, finally we decided to go for it, and now we cannot imagine what it was to watch TV before!

We got the box for just under 200.- at Target, and it was part of an offer where we would get one year of service for free via a 150$ rebate check. That amounts to a purchase price of just under 50$ for the hardware. It took me about one hour to hook up the machine and to get everything running, but it could have been shorter because I ended up hooking up the wrong cables. That was quite an accomplishment, because I had the huge poster that came with the device spread on the floor and this poster really does a great job in explaining the setup in detail.

Basically, you plug the cable-box (in our case actually the satellite box) into the Tivo, and then the tivo into the TV. You also connect a cable into the Tivo and position the other end of that cable next to the infrared sensor of the cable box. This is because from now on you'll use the remote from the Tivo to change channels on the cable box, and you can store away the remote from the cable/satellite box. It is also possible to connect the Tivo to a VCR or DVDR, so you can still play old tapes on the TV and also record programs from the Tivo onto VCR or DVD. I have not used this option, since I'm transferring recordings from the Tivo directly to my computer (see below).

Finally, you connect the Tivo to a phone line. Even when you later don't need that connection anymore, you'll need it for initial setup. This actually might be a draw-back for people who got rid of their good old land line and are now cell-phone only. I've read reviews from people who said that they had to take the Tivo box to friends who still had land-phone lines to set it up! During setup, the Tivo downloads some updates and the current schedule of your TV provider. Meanwhile, you can activate your Tivo service online, while the thing is setting itself up, or via the phone. The initial download over the phone line takes quite a while. When everything is set-up, and you entered your credit-card info on the Tivo website, you can plug a USB network adapter in one of the two USB ports of the Tivo box, and easily hook the box onto your wireless home network. I'm using an apple network, and setup was flawless, but for PC systems this should work as well. If you have a cable-based network, you can also hook an ehternet cable into the box.

The (wireless) networking option is quite conventient, since updates are made much faster. What I mean is normally Tivo connects in the middle of the night to the Tivo server to update programming and to download instructions that you might have entered on the Tivo website. Via the wireless network, this update occurs on a much more frequent basis, so last-minute online schedules you made are updated almsot on the fly. Programming the Tivo via the web works very well, by the way, and can be done from www.tivo.com, but also from a my.yahoo.com account, which is very convenient. When you are at "work" and a friend mentions you something about a show or movie coming up, you can schedule the recording right away, without going home. I prefer to schedule the recordings online, but it can also be done with ease using Tivo's remote control. Going through the menus is very easy, I think Tivo's menu is laid out very well and should be easy to understand by anybody.

When Tivo records a program, it stores it for a while on the hard drive and actually might delete it when new space is needed. This is something you have to keep in mind, and you might need to save the program "untill you delete it", via the Tivo menu. To save space or to record more programs, you might decrease image quality, but I would not recommend that. Image quality is quite good, and is comparable to what we get watching live over the satellite, but I have not seen how it looks on HDTV and I don't even know if the Tivo supports HDTV. You can sometimes see big pixels dancing on the screen, indicative of the heavy compression that Tivo uses. When you record more than one episode of, say, Seinfeld, those episodes are grouped in a folder, but unrelated programs are put in a list which can get rather long and confusing. A nice feature of Tivo is that it records programs that it "thinks" you might like, and those are saved under the folder "suggestions". If you like one of the suggestions, you push the green "thumbs up" buttons up to three times, or the red button, and Tivo "learns" what you like. If you like a recording, you can also get a "season pass" for that program, so it will automatically record all episodes.

Tivo rolled out a service called Tivo to go, where you can download programs from Tivo's hard drive onto your PC, via the wireless connection. That can take a while, but you can then free up space on the Tivo and watch the program on your laptop or a PDA. The service is not available yet for Mac, but that should arrive shortly, in spring. There are also some other new services, among which one that allows you to watch photos from your PC over the wireless network, or photos stored on Yahoo, and other related services.

The minus points of Tivo are the following. Changing a channel with the Tivo RC is a bit slow, but certainly nowhere near the 5 seconds claimed elsewhere on epinions.com. This might be a bit of a hassle for fast-zapping couch potatoes. Also, the Tivo is always on, and emits a rather bright white light during the night. I'm not sure if the hard-drive knows an "energy-saver" mode, but it seems to be running more often than not. In other words, Tivo is not exactly energy efficient which I find disappointing in this age where efficiency is becoming important, and rightfully so. Also, Tivo depends on the accuracy of your TV channel. If the show starts a bit later than promised on the schedule, you might miss the end of the show if you didn't allow some extra time for the recording. This is beyond Tivo's control, but it can be annoying. Another thing is that you have to keep in mind that Tivo costs almost 13$ per month. Many friends who we told about our Tivo seemed to think that you could skip ads with this service, but that is not true. You can fast-forward obviously, but this comes with a minor glitch. When you fast-forward and notice that the commercial is over and push "play", tivo never starts playing the very moment you push, but jumps back a couple of seconds, which can be annoying.

All in all, Tivo has changed the way we watch TV. It is very, very convenient, it allows us to interrupt live TV for emergency breaks, to stock a library of continuously updated children's programming, TV shows and movies, and, most imortantly, allows us to relax, finish dinner, put the kids to bed without stressing up, knowing that Tivo will record the show or movie right on time. It's almost as if we bought a little time machine.

Three green tumbs up for Tivo!