TiVo HD unboxed at the Fryar house
I have been using a PVR for many years, back before TiVo was a verb. The solution that I initially chose was called ReplayTV. This PVR was a great brand that was years ahead of everybody in it’s feature set. The ReplayTV would automatically detect and skip commercials during playback of recorded shows, streaming shows directly between units in the same house and even allowed you to download shows from others via the internet.
But my main love for the ReplayTV was its ability to download the shows to your PC as a standard MPEG file. I loved to be able to record shows, automatically remove the commericals and burn them to DVDs. I never really needed to buy a series DVD set due to this feature.
But alas the company that built the ReplayTV was mismanaged and they never updated the product in the 4 years I have owned one. Thus they do not support HD programming. And so here I am, having to switch to a different provider that in my mind had a limited feature set so that I could record in glorious HD.
So back to the story. Last Friday I come home to the UPS delivery man handing a large TiVo box to me. I actually did not touch the box until Saturday evening, probably because I secretly dreaded switching to the evil TiVo. Once opened I was quickly able to hook it to my HDTV via the HDMI cable and was quickly setting up the channels I support.
Now alas I can only get ATSC (Over the Air HD) and SD cable at the moment since I did not order any CableCards. But I am impressed with the quality of the picture coming form the TiVo box. All content is upscaled to 1080i to match my TVs highest resolution and even SD content looks great.
Since I also have a home theater computer right next to my TiVo I am interested in how to play music, movies and show pictures that are stored there w/o needing to preprocess them. I ran across some tools called PyTiVo and Galleon.
PyTivo is a great tool that will allow you to browse your media on your networked computer and directly download it. It can be almost any format and PyTiVo will convert it on the fly to a format the TiVo supports. Very nice and makes me think I can update it to directly stream shows from my existing ReplayTV boxes..Will have to look into that.
Galleon is a open source tool that allows you to browse and show/play your MP3s and Photos. I am sure it can do more but I have not looked into it too much.
So in a nut shell I am surprised and will post more as I do more with my new toy.
