HD Tivo owners?

[borghe]

Jeez.. so I feel like I am really just talking to the wind here... are there really only 2 or 3 HD Tivo owners? I mean geez.. All of the HD Tivo threads combined still don't have even a 5th of the views as the single TWC DVR thread. Anyone else get one? Anyone planning on getting one? They are readily available online and in quite a number of stores as well. DirecTV is currently handing out $200 credits and six months free of the HD Package... surely between that and all of the hacks that I've posted there has to be more than two or three interested DirecTV subscribers..

Bueller?

Bueller?

[sp44again]

Yeah, I would love one but I'm not forking over $800 for one. I have my limits.  I'll wait til the price goes down more.

[Steve Mann]

The $800 price line probably would have got me. I was damn near willing to go the $1000. However, being forced to look for other career opportunities has forced me to cut back on the 'frivolous' spending.  

[RainDog]

Just got mine up and running last night.

OTA reception with a Schneider 2DB shows great signal strength with all local digital channels, including 6.1
http://www.antennasdirect.com/IndoorAntennas.htm
60th and Vilet/Milwaukee area.

I got a $225 credit from DirecTV.  Still really expensive, but when I compare the costs of seperate STB needed to almost replicate the functionality of the HR10-250, it becomes a good value.

My HDMI port seems to be dead though.  I'll be getting a replacement next week.

Hacking?  Not yet.  I have a lot of tweaking to do on the HT setup to get it just right.  Maybe 6 months from now, after the newness wears off.  But I like to learn what you are doing and what I may do in the future.

-Steve

[borghe]

well, the one hack (that really isn't even a hack) that I recommend to EVERYBODY, is a storage upgrade... Especially this week where Best Buy has 250GB drives on sale for $150. It takes about 5 minutes to do and will give you 63 hours.. Worst comes to worst you blow away your Tivo and I stop over with my backup image and restore your box to new.. Would even do it for you for like a 6 pack.

edit - and make sure you call DirecTV and log your bug with not getting channel 58-1. If you don't know about this it works like this.. The Tivo incorrectly sees the multicasts on 46 as 46-2, 46-3, and 46-4. DirecTV hard maps the HD channels to 46-1, 46-2, and 46-3. This means 58-1 sees what's on 46-1 (nothing as far as the Tivo is concerned), 58-2 sees what's on 46-2 (CBS 58, or what is supposed to be on 58-1), etc.

There is supposed to be an upgrade coming out in two weeks, but until then it is annoying, and if it isn't fixed in the supposed upgrade that too will be annoying. Anyway, call DirecTV and better yet make a post on Tivo community about it.

[Matt Heebner]

I'd love to have one but $800 is way too much for me right now.
Kinda funny, a year ago I would have jumped at getting one. Now  looking for a new car for me, and thoughts of selling my house to move out of the city are keeping me "behaved".

Matt

[gparris]

When the price goes down to around $499 list and gets discounted, like now, with the Directv promotion, more will get in demand again...like later this year, perhaps.

[kjnorman]

Originally posted by sp44again
Yeah, I would love one but I'm not forking over $800 for one. I have my limits.  I'll wait til the price goes down more.

Likewise.

[kjnorman]

Originally posted by borghe
- and make sure you call DirecTV and log your bug with not getting channel 58-1. If you don't know about this it works like this.. The Tivo incorrectly sees the multicasts on 46 as 46-2, 46-3, and 46-4. DirecTV hard maps the HD channels to 46-1, 46-2, and 46-3. This means 58-1 sees what's on 46-1 (nothing as far as the Tivo is concerned), 58-2 sees what's on 46-2 (CBS 58, or what is supposed to be on 58-1), etc.

This also causes me to pause on buying one.  This "inconvenience" is certainly high in the WAF.  It has to be perfect overwise I may as well buy a kennel as I would certainly end up sleeping it one...

[borghe]

heh.. so this is really the first year I've used my Tivo for football in a long time.. since 2001 probably (2002 and later I've tuned in OTA DTV so I couldn't use it).. man..

man I forgot how great the Tivo was. pausing one tuner while watching the other. the instant replay button is awesome!!! skip back 8 seconds with the press of a button.. 8 seconds not far enough? skip back another 8... pause that game, switch back to the other tuner and unpause the other game right where you left it...

There are definitely quite a number of reasons I love the Tivo over all other DVRs, and yesterday was a great example.. let's see the TWC box do some of that.

[MarkS]

I just got mine.  Unfortunately, after hooking it up and spending over an hour on the phone with DirecTV, I'm back to waiting for another to be shipped.  Turns out the red component port on the DVR is bad leaving me with an all green picture.

Borghe, how did you go about getting the $200 credit from DirecTV?

Mark

[borghe]

well, if you haven't activated it already, call DirecTV and ask for customer retention. Tell them that with these problems and TWC's free DVR you are thinking about just returning it and going to cable.

If you've activated it already they already have you in a year contract so threatening to leave them won't do anything. At that point you can just play the pain and suffereing card (I PAID $1000 for THESE troubles?!?!?) and see if they'll throw a little love your way.

[RainDog]

Mark,
I called customer retention line (800-600-8977) before activating my HD Tivo receiver.  I basically mentioned that it was time to add HD to my home and I noticed many subsidised programs for HD receivers.  I asked if there was a credit available for the HD Tivo unit.  I was granted a $225 credit + 6 mo HD for free.  I was polite and did not have to pull any teeth or lay any threats of cancellation to get the offer.

I am waiting for my 3rd unit to arrive.  2 bad HDMI ports so far.
This is getting quite frustrating! :bang:

Otherwise, it rocks! :rock:  <- I've been dying to use that one!

[The Law]

What do you use to xfer stuff to DVD from these....can you pull of HD content and place it on the DVD - what does it look like, then?

[borghe]

Extracting video requires a USB network adapter and for you to hack your unit. To hack your unit you pull the hard drive from the box, put it in a skeleton computer (ie motherboard, ram, video card, memory, cdrom drive). Boot off of a linux cd, run some command line commands, and stick the drive back in the Tivo.

Once hacked you have to patch the tivoapp executable to turn off encryption.

With me so far? (btw, they are the exact same steps to hack any Tivo.. The HD Tivo is identical to other DirecTivos)

You now have a hacked tivo that isn't encrypting shows. You now have two places to go with it.

The simplest place is archiving. This means pulling the files off the Tivo in TMF format and storing them somewhere. A TMF file can be uploaded back into the Tivo and will look IDENTICAL to as if the Tivo recorded the show itself, with the channel number, actors, director, original air date, and everything. And because the stream is unencrypted, the TMF can be inserted back into ANY tivo (even stand alone Tivos, though obviously not HD streams). This is also really the most common thing to do with HD streams. Just archiving.

For SD streams, you can spend a couple minutes and format them for DVD. You never modify them, just put the MPEG2 into a different container. The result is that you have DVDs that are viewable on most DVD players and are bit for bit identical to what is sent down by directv.

Now HD is a little trickier if you want to do more than just archiving. If you want to burn it to a DVD-Video, you will first need to reencode the video to a lower resolution (720x480). Then you just author a DVD like normal.

One unique option you have at this point though is DVHS. You can actually convert the HD TMF/TY to a transport stream MPEG2 HD file. Once as a transport stream, you can then use a program like DVHSTool to send the file out firewire and to a DVHS deck. IT will again record to DVHS bit for bit how it was recorded to the Tivo.

Unfortunately aside from archiving there is no idiot proof solution as of yet for HD. For SD TyTool is THE idiot proof solution. You can get DirecTV SD to DVD in under 15 minutes including transferring. For HD the easiest at this point is to just archive it. If you are familiar with video compression you could also do anything with it as well. Reencode to HD Divx/XviD, reencode to DVD, etc. But if you aren't familiar with that stuff it could be quite daunting.

Right now my smallvilles, losts, and packer games are just going to DVD+R as TMFs. The Tivo is almost fast enough to upload in realtime, so I can start uploading a show and within 5-10 minutes start streamviewing it on the tivo (aka watch it as it is uploading).

There is some underground stuff going on that should be released within the next month that will allow watching HD streams on SD Tivos... that should be cool. I have been in contact with the authors of the program and it is pretty amazing.