After a looooong stint with the Comcast "Hell Box" (TM), TiVo finally released the Series 3. My initial thought was to wait a bit, see if there were any initial adoption issues, then buy when the price came down after the holidays. Not to be. I couldn't wait that long, as the Comcast box started misbehaving again, chopping shows apart, dropping the last N minutes of a show, or being frustratingly inflexible when scheduling recordings. I don't know why anyone writing PVR software would not support ending a recording before it is scheduled to end (the Motorola PVR with TV Guide software only allows you to record longer than the scheduled end time).
Well, I'm now a proud owner of a Series 3, exploring all that it has to offer. I ordered it last Saturday, on 2nd day air, so it arrived in Oakland on Tuesday night. I went down and picked it up from DHL, and while I was there, attempted to pick up a couple of cable cards from Comcast. I had called Comcast earlier that day, and was assured by a customer service rep that I could show up at my local office, and they would exchange my Motorola box for a shiny new pair of cable cards. However, when I showed up, the rep at the store said that they've been telling the people on the 1-800 line to stop telling customers this -- the cable cards are at the warehouse, not the office, and besides, said the rep, you need to have a tech install the cards. After a couple of swears directed at Comcast customer service, the rep finally agreed to go to the warehouse the next day. He kept the cards at the local office for me, and I arranged to pick them up on my lunch hour the next day.
On Wednesday night, I finally had all of the parts I needed. It was a bit of a stressful time getting the cable cards up and running, as the TiVo presents a lot of information screens to do with cable cards. I wasn't sure of 90% of what I was looking at, and when I called in to Comcast to enable the cards, the tech really couldn't help me out that much, as she wasn't even aware that TiVo boxes accepted cable cards. After 5-10 minutes conspiring with the tech over the phone, we managed to get both cards enabled, and I finally had good clear test signals on both tuners! Kazaaah!
I should mention that TiVo really goes out of their way to make this as easy as possible for people -- I was amazed to find that the box ships with cables for nearly every type of video connection. They ship composite, component, and a HDMI cable -- the only cable that was missing was a iLink cable for optical audio connection. My next step in the home theatre shuffle is to get a receiver that will switch HDMI. The setup I have now routes video directly into the TV, and audio routes through the stereo receiver via iLink. This is doable at the moment because I only have a single source that supports HDMI -- the TiVo. Some day, I may get a PS3, or update my DVD to HD-DVD-BluRay-or-whatever, which will also use HDMI.
I've found a number of reasonably priced (~$1200) receivers that support 2x HDMI inputs, and one HDMI out. Units that support three or more HDMI inputs are significantly more expensive (2x or more) at the moment, so I'll probably end up with component input on the game system. I read an article recently that says that video quality between HDMI and component inputs is highly dependent on the decoding hardware inside of the TV -- for some rigs, component might even look better than HDMI. Either way, I'm sure that I'm not going to notice the difference.
Back to the original story, though. TiVo is now up and running. The real reason I started this post was the non-TV features of TiVo. The series 3 (and series 2 too?) provides an app called 'Podcaster', which you can use to listen to a variety of podcasts. Right now, I'm listening to 'Wait.. wait.. don't tell me,' a funny NPR quiz show that I love to listen to, whenever I catch it on broadcast. Now I can just listen to it via TiVo whenever I want. There are a number of other similar features, ranging from Yahoo! local weather and traffic, to live365 streaming radio, and more that I haven't explored yet. If I find something that excites me enough, I'll write more (or... I won't write again until next August).
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