Posted on 05/23/2002 3:59:46 AM PDT by The Raven
"Brad, darling, please pass me the Parkay Margarine that is 100% free in fatty turboacids."
"Brad, darling, please pass me the Parkay Margarine that is 100% free in fatty turboacids."
If skipping the commercials is theft, promising us entertainment in exchange for watching them is fraud.
I bought a 30 hour Tivo and added another drive to give me about 120 hours of time. But you can determine the quality of the recording. My 120 hours is for lowest quality, I only have about 40 hours of best quality, but that is definately enough for me.
Tivo puts you in control of what you watch.
You can digitally fast forward a whole show and see what you think. You get a whole new perspective on how shows are put together.
And if you like how to shows, you can save them and re-run at will. Yes you can use tape, but it is not indexed, and has no name/description while in the recorder. The indexing alone makes them worth the money. The time shifting and ease of finding what you recorded makes it a slam dunk. Pausing and re-winding live TV is really useful.
And best of all it pus you back in charge of what you watch when.
I now have 4 DTV-Tivos. Bet Rush has 55. I paid $100 each.
tarpon
40 gb
It's incomparably better. For one thing, the TiVo lets you watch one show while recording another; you can even record two shows at the same time while watching one from the hard drive. So it's really more like two or three VCRs, not just one. But it also lets you pause, rewind and fast-forward a show while recording that very same show, something VCRs can't do no matter how many of them you have.
Here, for example, is how I watch football (which is the only Big Four network programming I watch). I have NFL Sunday Ticket, so I get about 13 games to choose from. I'll pick the two most promising ones and tune the TiVo to them. Whenever a commercial break comes up on one of them, I hit pause and flip to the other game. When that game hits a break, I pause it and flip back to the first. I never see any commercials, and I never have to sit through the sports droids' chatter during injury time-outs and official review. Plus, I have my own instant replay, so I can rewind to see great plays that the broadcast crew doesn't consider interesting.
They can have my TiVo when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. If they think it's stealing, then they can do what NFL and HBO do and charge me a subscription. But they're not going to do that, of course, because then they'd find out just how many people don't watch their sludge.
Yeah, that reminds me of another trick: Turn on closed-captioning and go into the first fast-forward mode. You watch the show 2-3x faster, but the subtitles still appear, barely slow enough to read. I love watching documentaries that way—it feels sorta like the brain-dump machine from The Matrix. :-)
No.
---max
Yes...buy an ATI Wonder Board for your computer....(with TV tuner) - it comes with DVR software
That I would be able to handle. What will be unbearable would be the feminine hygiene product placements...
Yep...me, too. Now I wish it had an additional tuner. I had to rewire everything to watch hockey on one channel and let TiVo do its thing on another.
Me: "HAL !"
Hal: "Yes Master"
Me: "Don't record liberals unless they're going to jail"
Hal: "Yes, Master."
I noticed that when playing with my brother's machine and was impressed that they implemented it. The TIVO unit has to buffer the captioning since it is broadcast at 30 pairs of bytes/second but can only be sent to the set at that same speed. Receipt of readable close captioning data is impossible on a VCR in fast forward mode because many byte-pairs just get dropped.
On that note, a few things I'd like to see in TIVO:
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.