New place, new Tivos!

So we moved into a new place last weekend -- hence my absence from the site updates. I haven't watched much television lately, but seeing how Dancing with the Stars is the number one program in this country, I don't think I've missed much. The good stuff (Reno 911, Rescue Me, Sports Kids Moms & Dads) is waiting for me on my "old" DirecTV Tivo combo unit whenever I want to watch it.

Since we were moving, we took the chance to upgrade to HD, which means we purchased an HD DirecTV DVR (they don't call them Tivos anymore, but they do use the Tivo technology, or at least some of it). The first unit we got died two hours after we hooked it up. The HDMI port totally failed. Fun! So a trip to Best Buy and I had a replacement. The audio portion of the HDMI failed about three days later, but the video still works. Since it's all going through a receiver and Bose system anyway, we can live with it for now.

So far, HD is awesome and the new Tivo is really fast. Part of the reason is we haven't set up many season passes on it yet -- they're still running on the old unit (now in another room). The only drawback is we're in a condo and the contractors only ran one HD line to each unit from the dish on the roof, so we can't use the dual tuner capability. We may set up our own dish on the balcony to remedy this in the future (we already have an OTA HD antenna set up) but for now we'll just have to creatively distribute season passes amongst the three Tivos.

Did I say three?! Oh yes! Since we had a stand alone receiver for the bedroom, we purchased a stand alone Series 2 Tivo to go along with it! It's single tuner and non-HD, but we get all the nifty features that Tivo offers but DirecTV has yet to adopt. We can use our wireless network to get updates, transfer programs to our computers with TivoToGo and even schedule recordings remotely from the Web.

It rocks, but it makes us doubly upset that the other two Tivos don't have those capabilities just because DirecTV doesn't want to answer home networking questions on its tech support lines. If they'd step up, we wouldn't have to worry about which Tivo recorded which shows, because we could watch any show from any Tivo on any other Tivo in the place.

Oh well, maybe someday... tivogirl can dream.

Posted by tivogirl at 10:29 AM