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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.

But I digress. Basically, every cable provider sends the data to its cable boxes in an encrypted and compressed format. This is why you need a cable box - it decrypts and uncompresses the signal so you can view it. The way a normal TiVo (non-HD) works is it takes the uncompressed signal and RE-compresses it and saves it to disk. All non-DirecTV TiVos have several levels of quality, the lower the quality, the more compressed it is and the less space it takes up. Unfortunately, HD signals are huge. To compress it on the fly would take way too much processing power. The way the Comcast DVR gets by is by storing the encrypted and compressed signal on the hard drive. Then it decrypts it when you go to watch it. But the encryption is proprietary, so TiVo cannot do the same thing! So sad. Enter CableCARD. Basically, the card gets plugged into a device - let’s say your new HD TiVO - and it is used to decode the signal and communicate with the cable company. Instead of a cable box, you have this card, and it lets any device directly play with the encrypted video signal.

Apparently, we should find out some more details at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January. I may be able to consolidate and get my DVR count down from three! Oh, the dual tuner part lets you record two shows at the same time, or record one and watch one live at the same time. It’s a very good thing. My cable box actually does it, which is a feature I would enjoy more if the interface were better.

TiVo Online Features!

It seems that having a sister-in-law who works at Yahoo! doesn’t guarantee that I get the scoop on anything. Apparently the Yahoo-TiVo partnership is much bigger than just enabling you to schedule shows on your TiVo from the Yahoo TV page - you can pull Yahoo! content down onto your TiVo box as well. There’s a page up on the TiVo site here, as well as a Reuters article about it here. It looks like it lets you get weather, traffic, and photos from your Yahoo account onto your TiVo. Nice, but not all that useful.

In addition, you can order movie tickets from Fandango and listen to podcasts (what’s up with those, anyway? Does anyway you know listen to them?). Here’s some screenshots taken by a beta tester.

Thanks, PVRblog for the info. I love my gadgets.