Category: video

TiVo Bolt

I ordered a TiVo Bolt yesterday. I’ve been using a cable company DVR ever since I upgraded from standard def to high def TV, and I’ve never been really happy with it. I had a TiVo Series 2 from 2004 to 2008. I retired it in favor of the cable company box because, at the time, I didn’t want to pay for a new HD Tivo. (I can’t remember exactly how much they cost, but I think they were pretty expensive at the time.)

The old Series 2 TiVo was pretty cool, but with a few rough edges. The IR blaster that you had to use to control your cable box was a kludge, and it didn’t always work. And, initially, the box had no connection to the internet; it had a modem connection that was used to dial directly into TiVo’s servers every night to download program guide updates. (At some point, I hooked up an external wifi adapter, which allowed me to unplug the phone cord, and allowed the TiVo to pull content down from the internet.)

The cable company DVR service costs me $12/month. And the cable box itself costs a little less than $8/month. So I’m paying about $20/month for equipment. With the Bolt, the first year of service is free, then it’s $15/month, if you pay monthly, or about $12.50/month if you pay for a full year in advance. And the cable company will charge me $2/month for a CableCARD. So. in the long run, the Bolt should turn out to be less expensive than continuing to use my crappy cable company DVR.

I don’t know why I haven’t bought a new TiVo before now. There always seemed to be good reasons not to. First would be the cost. The more recent boxes have actually been pretty affordable, and I get occasional emails from TiVo with specials on refurb units, but I could never quite talk myself into it.

Second would be perceived risk. Nearly every time TiVo releases a new unit, the reviews on it inevitably start off with a paragraph about how TiVo is a “troubled” company that can’t compete with DVR boxes provided by the cable companies. Yet they’re still out there, making new boxes, and doing well enough, as far as I can tell. And it’s been maybe ten years since cable companies started renting DVR boxes to their customers.

Third would be ambivalence and/or guilt about how much TV I’m watching. I’ve been toying with the idea of “cutting the cord” recently, but buying a new TiVo is also, in a way, a commitment to continuing to pay for cable TV. There’s not much point in the monthly TiVo subscription if I’m not also paying for cable TV. So I feel like I’m committing to cable TV for at least another year or three, if I’m paying for a TiVo now.

So I’m pretty well committed to keeping my cable subscription going for at least another year, I think. I’m having thoughts about dropping down to a slightly less costly service level, but I’m grandfathered into a plan that doesn’t exist anymore, and there really isn’t much flexibility in their current plans. I’d love to drop down to something that just has the broadcast channels, and a few basic cable channels, like Comedy Central and SyFy. But there really isn’t a plan like that.

I also need to figure out what to do with my old Series 2 TiVo. I’m a little embarrassed to say that it’s still sitting on the shelf under my TV. It’s at the bottom of a stack of equipment that’s basically stacked in “relevant” to “obsolete” order: Roku, Apple TV, Cable box/DVR, HD-DVD player, TiVo. So I can really get rid of the Series 2 and the HD-DVD player, and of course the Cable box will go back to the cable company. I did a little digging, and it looks like Best Buy will accept the TiVo and HD-DVD player for recycling (along with some other old electronics I have lying around), so maybe that’s a task for this weekend. I’d actually like to plug in the Series 2 and see if it still works, before scrapping it. Partially out of curiosity, and partially so I can wipe the hard drive. I don’t think there’s much that anyone could do with the information on the drive, but you never know.

And I’m also thinking about the best way to get the new TiVo hooked up, and in what order I should do things. The TiVo should show up in the mail next week, maybe on Tuesday. I need to get a CableCARD, and maybe a tuning adapter. I should be able to take care of that by going to my local cable company office on Saturday. Then I’ll have all the equipment I need to do the setup. Then I can hopefully return the cable company DVR next weekend. It occurs to me that there’s probably no way to transfer my unwatched content from the cable DVR to the TiVo (or anywhere else). And I don’t think I can have the TiVo and cable box hooked up at the same time. So I’m going to have to either binge-watch all the stuff on my old DVR before hooking up the TiVo, or just write it off. Well, I guess it’s good to get a fresh start once in a while, right? I am finding that I’m letting a few shows pile up, and I’m just not that enthusiastic about them, so maybe it’s time to start over and trim down on what I’m recording. I really haven’t been excited about Gotham or Blunt Talk, for instance, even though I feel like I should like them.

Poirot

I’ve been binge-watching old episodes of Poirot (via Amazon Prime) recently. I haven’t seen the early episodes since they first aired, and I probably haven’t see all of them, since I (of course) didn’t have a DVR in those days.

The series is coming to an end now, after about 25 years. There are good write-ups on it at NPR and the NY Times. I don’t think I’ll be signing up for Acorn TV just to see the last few episodes. I’ll wait until they show up on PBS (or possibly Amazon Prime or Netflix).

Hulu Plus

I blogged about Hulu Plus a few days ago, and the issues I had getting it run smoothly on my PS3. I e-mailed support about it, and they gave me a few things to double-check, so I did all that and the audio/video sync is still off by a bit, but it’s mostly tolerable.
Meanwhile, after not using my Wii for about six months, I decided to turn it on last weekend, and it wouldn’t work. I tried a few things, couldn’t get it working, and gave up on it. I even offered to give away all my games and peripherals on Facebook. I was going to pack them all up today, and get the main Wii box ready for recycling, but I decided to give it one more try.  Long story short, it’s working again.
So I decided to try out Hulu Plus on the Wii. It only became available for the Wii recently. It works pretty well though. The video quality is a bit lower than on the PS3, of course, but it’s watchable, the audio/video sync is good, and it’s pretty consistent (no jaggies). So I may decide to keep the Wii largely for the sake of Hulu Plus.

Hulu Plus

I signed up for a Hulu Plus account yesterday. The idea was that I’d use it on my PS3 to catch up on a few shows, and maybe watch a few of the Criterion Collection movies that they’ve got on there now. I’ve been pretty disappointed with it though. The biggest problem is that the audio isn’t quite in sync with the video. It’s not too far off, but it’s off enough to be a bit of a distraction. And the video gets a bit jaggy sometimes. I’ve run some speed tests on my internet connection, and it really ought to be good enough to do streaming video. I may cancel the account before my one-week trial is up. Or I might keep it long enough to catch up on Misfits and the last season of Battlestar Galactica, then cancel it.

TV fix

The remote for my TV stopped working today. Neither my cable remote nor the remote that came with my TV would work on the TV, so I knew it was a problem with the IR receiver, rather than the remote. I figured I’d probably have to get LG to replace the IR receiver, but I went ahead and Googled for problems with LG remotes, and found this. AVS Forum rules! I just sprayed some CRC 2-26 on a headphone jack, popped it in and out of the remote port in the back of the TV a few times, and everything works fine now. Sometimes, the internet is exceedingly helpful.

Tales of HDMI joy and woe

I’ve been slowly getting all the pieces together to get my new TV working well. I went out to my local Cablevision office today and traded my old cable box in for an HD box. My plan for the new box was going to be to hook it up directly to the TV via HDMI, then hook up the S-Video output on the box to my Tivo, so I could continue to record standard def stuff on the old Tivo. (I’m not quite ready to pop for a Series 3 Tivo yet.)
I wound up having a problem with this setup, that’s reasonably well-described here. I had to switch from HDMI to component. The picture’s still really good. And, surprisingly, the S-Video output to the Tivo seems to be way better than the S-Video output from the old box.
So now I’m set up to watch football next season in HD, though I won’t be able to use the Tivo functionality on it, unless I switch back to the standard def output. I guess that’s a good compromise until I’m ready to pop for the Series 3 Tivo.
I also hooked my HD-DVD player up via HDMI yesterday. I watched a couple of movies on that yesterday & today, and they look great.
So, now I’ve got the PS3 and HD-DVD player on HDMI, the Wii and cable box on component, the Tivo on S-Video, and the old PS2 on composite. I’ll probably retire the PS2 soon, since I also just got the little box I need to transfer my PS1 and PS2 game saves over to the PS3. Assuming Final Fantasy VIII, IX, and X work OK on the PS3, I think I can get rid of the PS2. That’ll be something else to sell on eBay, I guess.

random TV-related stuff

I picked up this antenna at Radio Shack today, in the hopes of picking up some over-the-aid HDTV. It didn’t work out; it only allowed me to pick up one station, NJN. I guess I’ll be taking it back to Radio Shack tomorrow.

I also started playing around today with the idea of streaming audio & video from my PC to my PS3, using Nero MediaHome. It, surprisingly, works pretty well. There’s a how-to here. You need Nero Ultra Edition 7, which I conveniently already have.