NYC Time-Warner customers getting DVRs

A story in today's NYT talks about the current plethora of digital cable and satellite choices for customers. It includes a note about Time-Warner's NYC customers getting DVR boxes. They are deploying Scientific American's Explorer 800, which features dual tuners and a 80Gb hard drive that records native digital signals, much like a Directivo (resulting in a much better picture free of compression artifacts). They're charging less than $10 a month for the service and the boxes are free making it much cheaper than TiVo. [via /.]

Should I upgrade my own tivo, buy a prepared drive, or have someone do it for me?

If you own a TiVo you've never upgraded but are considering it, and you've seen my writeup of my own upgrade process, and my review of a prepared drive installation, you are probably wondering what would work best for you. Before you can answer that question, a summary may help.

The DIY approach: You can go your own way

For my recently purchased Series 2 tivo (purchased for $199 - price still good until Thursday), I bought a bare 120Gb drive from newegg.com for $98, and an upgrade bracket and kit for $58. It took approximately 3 hours to complete the work, start to finish, including a couple hours wasted on research and trial and error, with about one hour of actual dismantling and rebuilding. The final product was a 188 hour TiVo at an upgrade cost of $156.

While the DIY upgrade may appear not for the faint of heart, if you've ever built your own PC you can definitely tackle this project. If you've worked with hard drive upgrades in PCs before and understand what master and slave jumpers are and what they do, you can totally do this.

The instructions that are out there are very detailed and easy to follow, and you can skip most of the tedious backup and restore steps. In reality, once I had my tivo opened up and the drive removed, I only had to connect up the two drives to my PC and run a single linux command from a bootable CD. The script was finished in a matter of seconds and the drives were prepared and ready to go.

I spent probably 15 minutes taking the TiVo apart initially, and putting the Twinbreeze kit in took another 30-45 minutes or so of reading detailed directions and piecing things together.

Middle ground: Someone does the icky PC stuff for you, you install

Your other option is to buy an upgrade drive ready to drop into your TiVo, and your task is simply to open it up, follow the supplied directions, and add the second drive. There is no shortage of small companies, websites, and professional hobbyists that offer this sort of package, including Weaknees, Hinsdale (the guy that wrote the upgrade how-to), TVrevo, 9th tee, among many others.

Looking at a few sites selling prepared drives, a 120Gb upgrade for my series 2 tivo will cost you $170 (replaces original drive only), $199, $229, or $189, depending on who you choose.

But what are you really paying for?

When you buy a prepared upgrade drive for your TiVo, you are essentially paying about double the price of a bare drive you could buy online. The dark secret of all these upgrade kits is basically that someone is sitting in an apartment running a program called BlessTiVo(scroll down to part 10, then configuration #1 to see the how-to on it). It's another single, one-line command from a bootable linux disk that takes seconds to complete. Then they tack on a $100 premium to the drive they bought for less than $100 and ship it off to you.

On the bright side, you're also paying for your valuable saved time. With most of these kits, all the steps that feel dangerous and cause nail-biting are handled by someone else. When your drive arrives, you pop open your tivo and put the new drive in, and you're done. In my DIY upgrade, I probably could have completed the drive install job in about a half hour.

I would even go so far as to say the Weaknees kit looks like the best deal of the lot, since they throw in their Twinbreeze kit. Where I paid $156 for my own drive and kit, they offer the same parts for $208 with the drive. If two hours of your time and some slight risk are worth more than $52 to you, the prepared drive and kit is a pretty good deal.

Do it for me: the clean hands approach

Most all the sites offering prepared upgrade drives also offer an upgrade service for those phobic to tivo tinkering. It's usually another $50 on top of other charges, and again, you're really paying someone to run a single command in linux and screw some drives in. I could imagine these guys getting the whole process down to maybe ten minutes with some practice. The main downside is that you have to give up TiVo for several days-to-a-week when you ship it off. The upside is aside from disconnecting your tivo and putting it into the mail, there's not much you have to do.

The cost for my TiVo upgrade done entirely by someone else would run $220 (replacing your original drive), $225, or $257.

The Verdict

Adding in my $199 cost of the TiVo, the bottom line is that my DIY upgrade cost me $355 and 3 hours of my time. If I went with an upgrade kit, the total cost would have been in the neighborhood of $400 and cost me about 30-60 minutes of time. If I would have paid someone else to do it all for me, it would cost about $425-450 and no TiVo for a week, which you can't really put a price on :). Before I set out to upgrade my TiVo, I would have guessed the price differences would be more pronounced, but keep in mind I bought an expensive kit that most TiVos do not require, so it could have been $50 less.

When weighing the options to determine what path you should take, the most important consideration is the cost of your time. If you're busy, pay someone else to do the time consuming bits for you. The second most important consideration is assessing your own level of technical expertise. If you've tinkered with PCs before, it shouldn't be any problem, but if you're new to digital gadgets you are probably better off paying someone to do it, and as you can see, it's not that much more expensive for a total upgrade service.

Stating the Obvious: iPod and TiVo

This new piece at Stating the Obvious talks about ideas for the next generation of iPods that may store content from music labels or the Apple store, and compares the device to TiVo's success with promotional advertising.

While I was skeptical at first of TiVo's promotional messages, I have to admit I kind of like the promotions that get downloaded to my TiVo. So far they've been fairly high quality, with movie trailers I wanted to see, beautifully produced porsche and lexus ads that run a couple minutes in length, and my personal favorite, the BMW short film ads that feature prominent actors and directors. I was tired of watching the BMW short films online, in tiny, grainy quicktime windows and welcomed the full resolution ads on my TV.

Michael Sippey should be happy to note that TiVo employs many of the ideas he lays out in the Home Media Option. I'm working on a full review of HMO for this site, but one of the cool things is that it comes essentially pre-loaded with photos and music from TiVo. It might be a broadband-only feature, since I'm guessing from looking at the content, it may use about 40-50Mb of storage. The "Music From TiVo" available in my Music and Photos section features a selection of music from Universal. I can't copy or buy the music, just stream for my enjoyment, but I was happy to see my favorite Jurrasic 5 tune and a broad range of other artists from 50 cent to Queens of the Stone Age.

I actually wouldn't mind seeing this feature expanded to more than one label, perhaps to a handful of record labels. I'm always looking for new music and don't listen to much radio anymore, so most mainstream stuff is new to me. TiVo has likely turned the space into a revenue source for them, and since it offers some utility to users like me, it's win-win for TiVo and customers alike.

The Prismiq

While searching around for a product that would let me stream video files from my pc to my TV, I found the PRISMIQ, a black box of sorts that does a lot of what the home media option on the TiVo offers, but also lets you stream video and your desktop to a TV. It offers an ethernet port and something I haven't seen too often: a PCMCIA slot to allow standard laptop wireless cards to be plugged in, giving you 802.11.

Mounting a second drive in a TiVo using Weaknees' Twinbreeze kit

In the previous stage of the upgrade process I covered how to prepare a new 120Gb drive for a series 2 TiVo. I purposely left out the steps where you install the drive back into the TiVo, saving that process for this review.

The first TiVo I upgraded last year was a Directv comibnation tivo/satellite receiver, and it was designed to handle two hard drives (but shipped with one). Adding a drive to that machine was no problem, since it was already pre-drilled for the drive and there was even spare IDE cables and power connectors available. The series 1 and series 2 standalone TiVos require a special bracket however, making things a bit trickier (I don't know if series 2 directivos have the bracket for a second drive still).

MythTV how-to

I've been considering building a media center project PC, and I was torn between choosing an open source, free software system like MythTV and Freevo, or a commercial OS like Windows Media Center. The thing that's kept me from trying the open source programs out was the complicated setup that requires some serious linux knowledge, and unknown device support.

MythTV looks fantastic, offers pretty much every feature of TiVo (recording, scheduling, playback, music and photos), and then some (picture-in-picture, weather reports, arcade games, downloaded movie playback, web front-end). Thankfully a step-by-step guide to setting up your own MythTV box has been written, and it looks very comprehensive and not insanely difficult for someone with basic linux experience. [via BoingBoing]

Study: TV tuning a 'must have' for computers

According to a Jon Peddie Research report, TV tuners are a 'must have' for computers and the study further claims that up to 30 million computer users have the ability to watch TV on their PCs.

That number seems incredibly high to me, considering my own purchasing habits and what I see on the market. I've owned probably 7 or 8 computers in the last five years and only one had a TV card in it. I'm also weary of how many people go to the extra effort to make it work. Of the 5 or 6 apartments and homes I've lived in over the past few years, only one place had a perfect setup: live cable in every room (and near my desk) that didn't require a set-top box. When it works, it's great, but in my experience it's tough to get everything working together.

Toshiba's new PVR laptop

After seeing my first Windows Media Center laptop (which features tv recording, movie, photo, and music playback and management), I wasn't impressed due to the form factor, but comments indicated that I was thinking too tivo-centric and portable PVRs have their uses.

Today Toshiba announced their new Windows Media Center notebook, and although I've seen the light on portable WMC machines, on this model I have to question the portability factor. It's based on their P25 17" widescreen system (copycat to Apple's 17" x-large pizza box?) which I've played with before. A couple things struck me about the P25 when I tested it: it's gigantic for a laptop, feeling even bigger than the powerbook, and it weighs a ton. About 10 pounds to be exact. At some point, these "portables" are going to feel more and more like lugging a desktop around. [via gizmodo]

Preparing an upgrade drive for the TiVo

I decided up front to buy a 40Gb TiVo knowing that I could upgrade it myself cheaper than what TiVo sold the 80Gb model for (an extra $100). To start off, I browsed the forums looking for tips and found that adding an additional 120Gb drive would be pretty cheap and be pretty painless.

After reading a lot of forum posts, it seemed clear that most people say you should get a 5400rpm upgrade drive, because the extra speed of a 7200rpm drive isn't really necessary in a TiVo, and only contributes more noise and heat to the machine. While shopping around for cheap 120Gb drives online, I couldn't find anything in a slower 5400rpm setup so I just decided to go with a 7200rpm drive from Maxtor.

TiVo announces new free bundled Basic service

Last week, Ryan posted a rumor that a basic tivo service was coming out and it looks like it is true after seeing their latest press release: Switching Channels: TiVo Revamps Strategy.

TiVo Basic will be freely included with some new upcoming PVR devices from Pioneer and Toshiba. TiVo Basic appears to offers live TV pausing, up to 3 days of show data that you can set recordings by hand, but repeat recordings are only by time and channel, with no season passes.

It sounds like it'll be software-upgradable, letting anyone with the free basic version move up to the regular version by ponying up the full monthly fee of $12.95. They're calling it a "trojan horse" form of marketing, though I wonder what sorts of conversion rates will be seen. My guess is most people buying a DVD player or set-top box that includes TiVo Basic would just stick with the included features, and that the convenience of extra features don't seem to be worth $13/month. [thanks rapunzel]