The Gizmophile

I finally joined the Tivo revolution after resisting it for so many years. It has been 5 months since I bought my refurb TivoHD from Tivo.com and so far so good.  I had a ReplayTV 5040 prior to this and it recorded many, many shows over the years. It even survived a lightning strike. No, not directly but thanks to a ghetto CAT5 cable going to the neighbor’s house (don’t ask), the ReplayTV unit got a little extra juice. Aside from a messed up hard drive, the unit lived on to record a few more shows. I ended up selling it on eBay and to my surprise, I still got nearly $400 for it.

TivoHD seemed like a logical replacement choice. After all, it has gained high acceptance among DVR users. It also has the one feature I wanted and that is the ability to record HD shows. The only thing that bothered me was the subscription fee. I ended paying the lifetime fee of $400 but if I crunched the numbers right, TivoHD should pay for itself after 21 months of ownership. That includes the savings from dropping the monthly cable box fees as well as the cost of the 1TB hard drive upgrade.

So far, the TivoHD hasn’t disappointed me. I’ve been able to record most of the Texas football games and watch it on the big screen with friends. By the way, HD on a big screen TV is nothing compared to HD on a projector screen hanging on your wall. It’s just that amazing. I can also stream mpegs from my computer to Tivo but the quality sucks and it eats up a lot of space. Fortunately for me, Netflix finally partnered with Tivo and now I can stream high quality movies without eating up space on my hard drive. Movie quality depends on your broadband connection so the faster your download speed is, the better the quality of the movie will be. I sure hope you don’t try this on your 56kbps modem. Do they still make those?

Additional features:

• Record two shows at once while still able to watch a previously recorded show
• Nearly 1,400 hours of standard recording or 140 hours of HD recording thanks to the 1TB hard drive upgrade
• Watch my photos on Tivo
• Network two Tivo’s together – but that’ll cost more money
• One cool gizmo!

If you’re wondering about the hard drive upgrade, it was actually easier than the ReplayTV upgrade. Mine didn’t take too long at all since the virgin TivoHD hard drive didn’t contain any shows. If you have a Tivo and would like to upgrade your internal hard drive, check out sites like Tivo Community, Bumwine and MFSlive.

If you’re not comfortable opening your Tivo, you can buy a My DVR Expander to increase your recording capacity. Not as fun but serves the same purpose. One thing you have to watch out for is a power outage. When the power comes on, your DVR expander might not power on and you could potentially lose your recordings.

So, what DVR are you using? Do you have Tivo too? Share your thoughts below.

-thegizmophile

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