Category: tivo

new TV

I bought a new TV yesterday. It was kind of inevitable that I’d trade in the old CRT for an HDTV of some sort at some point, but I guess the PS3 was the tipping point. It just didn’t make sense to have both a Blu-Ray and HD-DVD player in the apartment, and not have a decent HDTV. I got a 32″ LG from Best Buy. It’s this model. It works great with the PS3, but that’s the only device I have hooked up via HDMI at this point. I only had one HDMI cable in the apartment, and I didn’t want to pay Best Buy’s price for HDMI cables. Instead, I ordered some from MonoPrice. When they arrive, I’ll be able to hook up the HD-DVD also.
Alas, there’s not much I can do with the cable box / Tivo combination. That’s composite at best. I can get a new HD cable box from Cablevision, but that’s probably not going to do me much good unless I trade up to an HD DVR, which I’m really not ready to do yet.
The Wii can’t do HDMI, but I can trade up from composite to component, which my friend tells me is worthwhile. I should have ordered a Wii component cable set from Monoprice when I ordered the HDMI cables from them, but I didn’t think of it until after I’d placed the order. Looking around, it does seem that Wii component cables are nearly as overpriced as HDMI cables — $6 from Monoprice, $30 elsewhere.
I’m also thinking about getting an antenna, so I can pick up over-the-air HDTV. Antennas are cheap enough, though I’m not sure how well they’ll work here in Somerville. We’re basically too far from both New York and Philly to pick up regular TV or radio stations from either market without some grief, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to pick up a few stations with a good antenna.

TiVo stuff

Now that I have my TiVo connected to my network, I’ve been playing around with a few things that I thought might be worth blogging about.

First, the new online services appeared on my box a few days ago — Yahoo weather, Live365 music, podcasting, and so on. All this new stuff is pretty neat, but there are some rough edges. For instance, everything is pretty slow; sometimes it takes a few seconds for the TiVo to respond to a click from the remote. The podcasting application does a reasonable job of playing podcasts, but it doesn’t support fast forward or rewind. Weird. I think the killer app here would be support for pulling down video podcasts to the TiVo, but that’s not included yet. I really don’t have much interest in sitting in front of my TV and listening to audio, but it would be real convenient if I could pull down video from the internet and watch it on the TiVo instead of my home computer.

I’ve also been playing around with the standard TiVo Desktop software. This is fine for streaming music from your computer to your TiVo, but, again, that’s not really that useful or interesting. The ability to pull shows from my TiVo to my computer is kind of interesting, but I haven’t bothered trying it out yet. I would up turning off the TiVo server software on my machine, since the software doesn’t seem to be able to exit gracefully when I turn off my computer. It pops up a whole bunch of error dialogs that need to be dismissed. Very annoying. I know other people have had this problem too; I’ve seen several references to it on the tivocommunity forums.

I also tried out an open source program called Galleon. This is a server program that runs on your computer and lets you do a bunch of interesting things with your TiVo. Unfortunately, I found that it ate up a lot of RAM and processor time, even when it should have been idle, so I uninstalled it from my machine. I think one of the problems here is that it’s written in Java, which has always caused some trouble on my current machine.

So, in a nutshell, about the only useful thing I’m getting out of the network connectivity at this point is the ability to check Yahoo weather. Maybe at some point, I’ll straighten out the problems I had with Galleon, and do something interesting with that. Or I’ll get completely fed up with FM radio, and start listening to audio on the TiVo, either podcasts, Live365, or my own audio collection.

TiVo

I got a Netgear WG111 network adapter for my TiVo last week. I bought one online from BestBuy.com, figuring it would be the right adapter, since it was listed under “accessories” on their Tivo page. No luck though — I got a v. 2 adapter, which didn’t work. I returned it to my local Best Buy store with minimal hassle, and had a friend pick up a compatible adapter from *his* local Best Buy, which happened to have a couple of them in stock. It works fine, and was only $30. (I see they’re up to $57 this week, so I guess I got it just in time.)

I installed TiVo Desktop today. It seems to be working fine, though I haven’t tried to transfer anything from the TiVo to my computer yet. The functionality for viewing photos and listening to music via the TiVo is working fine.

The music functionality might actually be worth taking advantage of; I have a lot of music on my computer that I’d like to listen to on my stereo. I don’t sync my iPod to my desktop PC, and my DVD/CD player on my stereo doesn’t play CD-Rs, so I’m pretty much SOL for listening to music from my desktop PC on the stereo, unless I transfer it to my iBook, then sync it to my iPod, then hook *that* up to the stereo.

new TiVo

I went out and bought a TiVo today. It seems to be working OK so far, but I do have to say that the IR blaster is a total kludge. It looks silly, and it takes longer than it should to change channels. All cable boxes, TVs, VCRs, etc, should have a standard serial port. Or Bluetooth. How hard would that be?

I now have a TV, VCR, DVD player, laserdisc player, PlayStation 2, and a TiVo. I think I’m done with A/V equipment for now. I have no room to put anything else!