Stopgap Solution
February 12, 2005
Lisa’s not digging the current flow of recording shows on my PC and then either watching them on my PC or burning them to DVD to watch on our television. So today we bought a 40 hour TiVo. 40 hours should be enough since I should soon have access to TiVo To Go. That will allow me to offload programming I want to keep a while to my PC, which has abundant storage.
TiVo so far is nice. It’s much easier to set up than MythTV has been, though I can’t fault MythTV since it’s still in it’s infancy (despite having been around a couple of years).
TiVo’s not all a bed of roses, however. There are some issues to using it:
- Initial setup requires a phone line. You have to do the first update to get the new software and THEN you can use a network adapter.
- Network adapters certified by TiVo suck. You can use an 802.11b WiFi adapter (WUSB11), a USB 1.1 ethernet adapter (100TX) or you can use a flimsy USB 2.0 ethernet adapter (USB200M).
The poor network adapter support is a real pain with TiVo To Go coming. As Rasmus points out, using the slow adapters to transfer programming requires many hours.
In the meantime, I’ll enjoy TiVo to the fullest. I imagine in the next 6-12 months I’ll have a shiny new HDTV dual-tuner DVR from Comcast. Additionally, I still plan to play with MythTV to get it working with my tuner card.
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