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http://www.zatznotfunny.com/2006-09/tivo-series3-reference/

It’s here, it’s here!

Great sadness invades the Tara household as I suffer through continual internet connectivity problems. I’ve had intermittent trouble since Comcast hooked everything up a mere week or so ago. My connection constantly disappears, I have to power cycle my cable modem all the time, and it just keeps getting worse. Today it got so bad that I couldn’t connect at all. How are you writing this post then, you ask?

Well. I removed the splitter from the cable wire. I have a 3-way splitter with one cable coming to my modem, one to the Motorola HD cable box/DVR and one to my TiVo. Every split diminishes the signal strength. And my modem doesn’t seem to like this low signal strength. At least I have a work around. But I must keep my DVRs fed with streams of TV data, so I can only log on when there’s nothing on TV I want to record. This must be fixed!

I called Comcast yesterday and the earliest service appointment I could get that was not during my work hours was September 9th. Yup. Weeks and weeks away. I might try going to the Comcast office and trading in my cable modem for a different one to see if that helps. But if it’s a signal strength issue, that ain’t gonna fix it. I might try picking up a signal amplifier type thing from RadioShack. I can’t live like this! How primitive…

Read about this a few days ago at PVRBlog but just haven’t had a chance to post about it. Basically, this forum post has news that there’s a new TiVo coming out - well 2 of them, one is 80 hours and one is 180. It’s not a TiVo Series 3. It is not HD.

I’m not sure what the strategy is here, exactly. They’ve introduced a new pricing model where you don’t actually pay for the box anymore, they just spread that cost out over the per-month fee. (So you’re still actually buying it, you just don’t have that upfront cost) Maybe this is just a move to keep their existing boxes viable since the Series 3s will probably cost major money. So if you are curious about TiVo but have a box from you cable company (like I do) that’s dual tuner (like mine) and can record 2 shows at once, you probably wouldn’t want to buy a current Series 2 at all. But still. I’m not quite sure on this whole thing.

I have no intention of getting one of these. I already have 3 PVRs. A Series 1 TiVo, a Series 2 TiVo and my Motorola dual-tuner HD cable box. I’m waiting on Series 3 for sure.

People keep telling me TiVo is dead/dying. I don’t want it to be true. But I can see how it would be really hard to get a non-tech savvy person to buy a TiVo today when they can just get something from their cable company to do it. Dunno, dunno.

It’s here, it’s here! Megazone has posted some pics and information about the TiVo Series 3. (And yes, Megazone, you are the only one with info about it on the internet! All the other info I found references your post)

Apparently, Megazone is getting swamped because he has all the pics, so if you want to see some of them without waiting, a good mirror is over at Zatz Not Funny.

The main points are that it supports Cable Card, can record two HD shows at once, and it’s coming out this year. I’m psyched! Maybe I can finally trade in my Comcast box after all.

I just read up on a bunch of information on TiVo goings on. Very exciting stuff! What’s ahead?

Dual Tuner HD Cable Card TiVo

So I was just talking the other day about how TiVo really should put out an HD CableCARD box. And today I found this blog post on TivoBlog that says they’re doing just that! For those who don’t really know what the big deal is, there is currently only one TiVo on the market that lets you record in High Definition, and that’s one that’s a DirecTV tuner. So if you’re not a DirecTV subscriber, you are out of luck. Instead, I’ve been forced to put up with Comcast’s DVR. Which works alright, it’s seen much improvement from its first iteration, but the interface isn’t nearly as streamlined as TiVo’s, and it has this terrible “feature” where if the cable box is shut off and a scheduled recording comes on, the box turns on but mutes itself. And I haven’t found anyway to unmute it short of turning of the box. So if you come home to it mid-recording, you have to wait until it is done to watch anything. So silly.

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