"Ed" wrote in message
om...
T H Z wrote in message
t...
We have Sky+ and we want a Freeview PVR.

snip

My advice therefore would be to wait.

My advice is to get a TiVo off Ebay or TiVoland.com and a Freeview box whose
use is only for the TiVo.

Sadly, its vast functionality and superior features to everything else (such
as Sky+ and the Pace Twin) will leave you wishing that those TiVo features
were incorporated in those dual tuner PVRs.

Japan and the USA have really great TiVo PVRs. I guess we have to wait for
the UK market to mature for a better PVR to come along.

My bet is that it will take 5 years for PACE or Sky+ to achieve what the old
UK Thomson has NOW!


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"Cyril" wrote in message ...
"Ed" wrote in message
om...
T H Z wrote in message
t...
We have Sky+ and we want a Freeview PVR.

snip

My advice therefore would be to wait.

My advice is to get a TiVo off Ebay or TiVoland.com and a Freeview box whose
use is only for the TiVo.

Sadly, its vast functionality and superior features to everything else (such
as Sky+ and the Pace Twin) will leave you wishing that those TiVo features
were incorporated in those dual tuner PVRs.

Japan and the USA have really great TiVo PVRs. I guess we have to wait for
the UK market to mature for a better PVR to come along.

My bet is that it will take 5 years for PACE or Sky+ to achieve what the old
UK Thomson has NOW!

What are the superior features of the TIVO? My Humax PVR does
everything that I want it to and there is no subscription, or will
when I get the 7 day EPG. I cannot see any gain in having the extra
features of a TIVO, and it is less intergrated and easy to use than
just having a Freeview PVR.

Ed wrote:
What are the superior features of the TIVO? My Humax PVR does
everything that I want it to and there is no subscription, or will
when I get the 7 day EPG. I cannot see any gain in having the extra
features of a TIVO, and it is less intergrated and easy to use than
just having a Freeview PVR.

Until you've used the extra features of a TiVo it's often hard to see
what good they are; once you have, you can't manage without them.

From looking at the Humax manual, it looks as though all you can do is
bring up a programme in the EPG and tell the Humax to record it, pretty
much like programming a video from the teletext entry. There's also a
maximum of 20 future reservations that can be stored. (I'm presuming
that limit is not part of the EPG limitation). Of course the software
may be improved in the future.

On the TiVo you can bring a programme up in the EPG and tell the TiVo to
record it and any other showing of the programme on that channel,
keeping the latest X programmes (or all of them). It will automatically
prevent the same episode being recorded twice in 28 days (to handle
channels that repeat programmes). You can order the season passes so
that "important" programmes will get recorded in preference to lesser
programmes should there be clashes. Setting up season passes is pretty
much a fire-and-forget operation; I set up most of my season passes a
couple of years ago and now don't even have to pay attention to when
new series of programmes start, as the TiVo will pick them up. I have
currently around about 50 or 60 season passes. And, of course, the EPG
is at least 14-day (it can be longer, but the terrestrial channels don't
produce data that far in advance).

You can also set wishlists for programme titles, subjects or people
appearing in the programme - for example, I have a wishlist for "Adam
Hart-Davis" as I tend to enjoy the programmes he's in, and that will
pick up Science Shack, Local Heroes, etc. I also have one for "Iron
Chef" so that if any channel apart from Challenge starts showing it I'll
get those episodes too. And I have some more complex ones - for example,
when "24" was on both BBC2 and BBC Choice I had "24" in a wishlist, with
the title of "24" and the genre set to "Drama" (IIRC) so that it would
pick up "24" itself but not the boring dicussion shows (or anything else
with "24" in the title).

And, of course, there's network cards and other addons available, plus
wonderful bits of user-added software like TiVoWeb (WWW interface to the
TiVo) and Endpad (which adds padding to the start and end of programmes
in an intelligent fashion, allowing logic such as "add 5 minutes to the
start if there's nothing already recording, if there is add as many of
those five minutes as you can").

The TiVo is by no means perfect, but it certainly has much better
features (currently) than Sky+, the Pace Twin or the Humax. Now, if only
some manufacturer would produce a Series 2 box in the UK I'd buy at
least two.

--
Angus Rae,
EUCS, Science & Engineering Support
University of Edinburgh
The above opinions are mine, and Edinburgh Uni can't have them

On 23 Apr 2004 05:40:05 -0700
(Ed) wrote:

"Cyril" wrote in message
...

snip

My bet is that it will take 5 years for PACE or Sky+ to achieve what
the old UK Thomson has NOW!

What are the superior features of the TIVO? My Humax PVR does
everything that I want it to and there is no subscription,

You can buy a lifetime subscription for the TiVo, so I just considered
it to be 200UKP more than the selling price.

or will
when I get the 7 day EPG. I cannot see any gain in having the extra
features of a TIVO, and it is less intergrated and easy to use than
just having a Freeview PVR.

The EPG is a lot longer than 7 days, so you can check TV for the entire
length of a holiday before you leave.

The TiVo can be configured to use its free disc space to record programs
on spec for you. This has found programs for me on channels that I don't
normally watch.

I don't know what else because I have not looked at the Humanx PVR.
--
Flash Gordon
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Although my email address says spam, it is real and I read it.

On 23/04/2004, Ed wrote in message
:

What are the superior features of the TIVO?

Mostly to do with recording and retention policy. The TiVo software
allows you to do rather strange things. Two examples:

a) If you set it to record _Under Siege_ and it will start scoring
Stephen Segal movies higher. Anything with a high enough score
gets automatically recorded unless it needs all its disk space
free for things you've explicitly said to record. Scoring is
based on title, actors, tags (e.g. Sci-Fi, History), production
company, etc..
b) You can set to it record an episode of _The Simpsons_ and then
add 'whenever shown' and it will automatically record then whenever
and on whatever channel they're shown. And if none are shown for
a season and they come back on the following season, your setting
is still there.
c) You can set it to record many programs at the same time and it
will use scoring to settle the clashes, recording as much of all
of them as it can.

The second facility would be invaluable for things like _Stargate SG-1_
and _Andromeda_ of which a random number are shown at random times
between midnight and 6am one night a week. It takes me about five
minutes to program them into my PVR every week.

Simon.
--
Using pre-release version of newsreader.
Please tell me if it does weird things.

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004 17:44:06 +0100, Angus Rae wrote:

The TiVo is by no means perfect, but it certainly has much better
features (currently) than Sky+, the Pace Twin or the Humax. Now, if only
some manufacturer would produce a Series 2 box in the UK I'd buy at
least two.

A decent tivo, with modular reciever options so you can dump programme
streams directly from your chosen tv source (freeview, sky, cable etc)
would be absolutely killer, as long as you could opt out of all the weasel
"report back to base" and mothership control features. Better yet with
multiple reciever bays, so you could make it a twin reciever box like sky+
or pace twin.

It'd be asking a bit much to mix and match the reciever types, that's moon
on a stick, but that'd be killer, like the modular interface slots in
routers :-)

Oh, and maybe modular output bay, so if you wanted to, you could pay extra
for (say) SDI out etc. That's utterly unlikely, though.

Anyway, I'll stop dreaming now, it's not gonna happen.

--
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[- ancipital attt hotmail dott cohm -]
"I'm not crying victim, but I am stating that a lot
of spammers are genuine scumbags." -Sanford Wallace

Simon Slavin . uk
wrote:

On 23/04/2004, Ed wrote in message
:

What are the superior features of the TIVO?


b) You can set to it record an episode of _The Simpsons_ and then
add 'whenever shown' and it will automatically record then whenever
and on whatever channel they're shown. And if none are shown for
a season and they come back on the following season, your setting
is still there.

That would be useful - but mine certainly doesn't do that. Season passes
(which are programme specific) are channel specific. Wishlists while not
channel specific don't allow you to specifiy particular programmes.

//Andrew

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On 23 Apr 2004 05:40:05 -0700, (Ed) wrote:

My Humax PVR doeseverything that I want it to and there is
no subscription, or will when I get the 7 day EPG.

The TIVO may be technicaly superior, but at £145 the Humax is a
bargain for what it does.

JB

On Mon, 26 Apr 2004 21:51:33 +0100, JB wrote:

The TIVO may be technicaly superior, but at £145 the Humax is a
bargain for what it does.

Agreed. I bought the Humax as I was unsure about Tivo's future in the
UK without available hardware and thought the Humax would do me for a
couple of years until the PVR market matures a bit.
--
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Help make Usenet a better place: English is read downwards,
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"Andrew Cook" wrote in message

Simon Slavin . uk
wrote:

On 23/04/2004, Ed wrote in message
:

What are the superior features of the TIVO?


b) You can set to it record an episode of _The Simpsons_ and then
add 'whenever shown' and it will automatically record then
whenever and on whatever channel they're shown. And if none are
shown for a season and they come back on the following season,
your setting is still there.

That would be useful - but mine certainly doesn't do that. Season
passes (which are programme specific) are channel specific. Wishlists
while not channel specific don't allow you to specifiy particular
programmes.


Yes they do! Use a Title Wishlist. I have two or three now to cover LivingTV
and its +1.


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