adam reeve

It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to watch TV without a DVR. My memory for schedules and lack of tolerance of commercials makes regular live programming a bit of a nightmare. The problem is, I also like HDTV and subscribe to cable – which rules out the most common solutions (TiVo, ReplayTV, MythTV, MediaCenter etc) as they all lack either the ability to decode the encrypted signal or the ability to record in HD. The only choice was the DVR offered by the cable company themselves, the Scientific Atlana 8300HD. Alas, it sucks. Completely. It’s slow, unreliable, hard to use and lacks many basic features. I wouldn’t wish this abomination on my worst enemy.

Enter the TiVo Series 3 – the first DVR to support CableCard and thus allow HD recording from digital cable. Recently there was a promotion for Father’s Day which reduced the price of the unit to around $400. Given that I’ve wanted one since they were originally released at closer to $1000 this seemed like a opportunity not to be missed.

So initial impressions were great, the box is very nicely designed, has a lot of nice touches (like the backlit remote and front display which shows the names of shows being recorded) and comes with every connection known to man. Getting it setup required the cable company to come out and install the CableCards, which took about an hour and then we were rolling.

There are a lot of TiVo reviews out there so I’m not going to go into every detail about how this thing works, suffice to say I’m glad to be back with the original (and still the best) after a few years. The search functions work wonderfully, the Season Pass manager is still a great way to keep an eye on what’s set up to record and everything works very smoothly.

I’ll also mention that the picture quality is superb, obviously for digital channels (they’re captured in a native format) but also for analogue channels which need to be recompressed. We’ve had virtually none of the drop outs, blank screens or static which plagued the old box, and the storage space is roughly doubled.

Of course there’s always a downside. In this case it’s a pretty well known one – the disabling of many of the cool network features found on the Series 2 models. This includes things like multi-room viewing (watch shows recorded on a different TiVo over the network) and TiVo-To-Go (download shows to watch on a computer or handheld). There’s no technical reason for these features to be removed – it’s due to a ruling made by the organization which licenses the CableCard technology. Until TiVo manage to persuade them otherwise we’ll be slightly poorer feature-wise. Still, all in all it’s still a worthwhile investment in my opinion. The Series 3 may be expensive ($600 purchase plus $10-$15 a month subscription) but it’s actually worth the money, unlike the (much cheaper) cable company provided model.