The toy I referenced a few days ago has arrived. It is a new TiVo for our home.
There are several problems with the old TiVo I’m hoping the new one will solve:
- Unreliable channel changing. Because TiVo has to tell the cable box to change the channel, and it does so via infrared, there’s an opportunity for it to screw up. That means that TiVo might record a 1/2 hour of Access Hollywood instead of Jeopardy. These shows are not comparable.
- No high-def recording. If we want to watch TiVo, we put the TV on one source and watch standard def. If we want to watch high def, we put the TV on a difference source and it pulls video directly from the cable box. Since it’s not routed through TiVo, there is no pause/ff/rew.
- Cabling nightmare. Besides our game consoles, we have two signal sources running to the TV: TiVo and HD. This means there are three cables running from TiVo to TV (1 video, 2 audio), and five cables from cable box to TV (3 video, 2 audio). That’s a mess of cables… it’s difficult to make that look tidy and organized, even with tie-wraps.
- Recording conflicts. I missed last week’s new 30 Rock episode because someone put American Idol ahead of 30 Rock in my Season Pass list. Thank God for Hulu. Regardless, this is now moot, since the new TiVo will be able to record two shows at once.
- Lazy TiVo. Our current TiVo is lazy. It sometimes takes 10 seconds or so for it to get off its ass and respond when we push the Guide or TiVo buttons. Navigating through screens in the Guide is painful sometimes, as well. I feel like TiVo kept cramming more and more software onto the box via periodic updates, without little regard to how it would effect UI performance.
The new TiVo solves problem #1 through the use of CableCARDs. Each cable card does the same basic job as the giant cable box its replacing. Since the TiVo and cable box are now merged, there’s no kludgy channel change procedure. It changes the channel with 100% accuracy. Great success. Problem #3 is resolved via HDMI cable. There’s now one thin-ish cable doing the work that 5 used to. Much tidier. And hopefully the newer hardware is more capable of handling all the features they cram on to these boxes, meaning a more responsive UI.
There is one frustration I’ve encountered so far, though. The USB wireless adapter I use with the old TiVo isn’t compatible with the new one. I don’t know why this is. 802.11g is 802.11g. Backwards compatibility, anyone?