tivo?

raggie33

*the raggedier*
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them digtal recorders i always wonder about them do ya nneed to subscibe to a service to use em.tell me about em if ya can please thank you
 

IlluminatingBikr

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Yes, you need to subscripe to tivo. What the subscription does is enable the tivo to call a place where it gets the tv schedule for the next two weeks. It uses a phone line to call, and they can call late at night.

There are two ways to subscripe to tivo. The first is to pay a monthly fee. The other option, is to pay several hundred dollars up front, but then you have no monthly fees. If you go with the one-time fee subscription, it will last you the life of that Tivo. If it breaks or anything, you need to start paying again.

Check out tivo's website; it's pretty nice and informative.
 

James S

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I absolutely love my TiVO /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif We have the DirectTV built in model here and so pay a small ($4.99) monthly fee to them for that additional service, instead of the $15 I think that they charge for the non-direct TV service.

If you want to go with the lifetime service, wait a few months for the thing to burn in and make sure it's not a lemon. Once you're sure you're happy with it then you can update to that at any time. If it's the hard drive that fails in the future (and that is the most obvious thing to fail) then you can replace that yourself without loosing the lifetime subsccription, and if something else goes wrong right away they have definitely been known to move it from one box to a new one for you, but they don't have to and they seem to decide that on a case by case basis. What they won't do is transfer it to a new box just because you wanted an upgrade. For example, if you wanted to upgrade your current one to an HDTV version that just became available, you'd have to purchase that again.

However, I believe that you coudl eBay your old one along with the lifetime subscription. I'm not sure about that though.
 

raggie33

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ekk i cant afford 15 per month ill wait to it drops inprice.but it sounds like cool thing to hvae
 

kubolaw

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The subscription does go with the machine, so if you buy one with a lifetime subscription, you won't have to pay the monthly fees. But I don't think the subscription can be transferred from one unit to another, so if your unit breaks, you have to buy a new machine and subscription.

If you get one of the original "Series 1" units, you can use it as a digital VCR without paying any subscription. You don't get any of the neat features (show listings, season pass), so you just record by time (like a regular VCR). I bought a Series 1 Tivo for $100 a while back and use it this way (I am too cheap to buy the subscription). Even without the subscription, it's still much better than a VCR (IMO).

John
 

binky

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This thread got me thinking, esp since Raggie is a computer guy, is there an open source Tivo equivalent? I mean, can you just set up a cheap linux box with a decent vid card & big drive to do the same thing hooked to yer tv & cable/dsl line? Maybe there's an tv showtime/channel listing publicly available too on the net so you get exactly the same capability as with the subscription version of Tivo?

Just a hope.
 

Mednanu

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OSX has an SDK to allow HDTV recording directly into a firewire port from an IEEE1394 equiped cable box. You might be able to recompile it for Linux if you are so inclined. This would be relatively little or no out of pocket cost to set up.


Orrrrr, you could just check ATI ( or your favorite brand/manufacturer ) for a video card that will do the same from a hardware level, rather than through software like the SDK above. There are several cards on the market that should allow you to do this, but are probably geared more towards Windows, rather than a Linux box.
 

binky

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What's the name of the dev kit for OS X? (Not that raggie has os X but I'm just curious. I hope this doesn't stray too far from your topic raggie.)
 

James S

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Mednanu, thanks a lot, now I'm going to be up all night googling and compiling /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Course, none of my cable boxes have a firewire port, but I can fix that too /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif
 

raggie33

*the raggedier*
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well i did something like that before used the ati card ati aiw 9600,it was nice it even had some kinda free service where it downloaded tv shedule ya could pasue live tv etc etc ya just cliked the programs ya want to record.but i didnt like the aiw it captured good but the video game part of card stunk so i took it back
 

Mednanu

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[ QUOTE ]
binky said:What's the name of the dev kit for OS X? (Not that raggie has os X but I'm just curious. I hope this doesn't stray too far from your topic raggie.)

[/ QUOTE ]

The full article on how to request an IEEE 1394 cable box as well as aquire the SDK ( or even better, a pre-hacked version of it ) is located at the following link: Article + Hack

It's free'er than you think. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/santa.gif
 
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