Quote:
Originally Posted by ckellyusa /forum/post/18247649
I have a question for those of you who like/use Tivo's. Why did you decide to go the Tivo route? ... Or more specifically, with Ceton's CableCARD tuner coming out at the end of the month, what advantages does the TiVo unit have over a media center system? I'm intrigued by the new TiVo, but it's limited to 2 channels and that I know of, no network sharing of the recordings...
Please let me know! Thanks.
Having just recently switched from my old Tivo DirecTV HD10 receiver to a Home Theatre PC, I might be able to shed some light - at least on the comparison btw Tivo and HTPC.
For one thing, while both the Boxee and Hulu apps for the HTPC look interesting, they're both relatively new and one or both still calls itself "beta." Either way, though, they're both QUITE buggy. It's also impossible to jump ahead in the commercials with these services. In fact, trying to do so can cause problems. I've had to restart videos from the beginning because the player got confused and I've had the audio from the commercial and the video playing simultaneously.
Even if these problems were fixed, though, availability of content on Boxee and Hulu is unpredictable at best. The withdrawal of Comedy Central from Hulu recently was widely reported. Plus, I notice a couple of shows I watch like Two and a Half Men and How I Met Your Mother haven't been updated in a couple of weeks - despite the fact that both seem to be promoted heavily in online services [note: I noticed CBS seems to have stopped updating them on cbs.com for now, too].
I've also had quite a bit of difficulty playing DVDs using Boxee.
Windows Media Center seems more mature and therefore less buggy than the above applications. If you have a tuner card in your HTPC, you can also record and play videos with WMC similar to a DVR. Boxee and Hulu don't support recorded video.
On the other hand, WMC doesn't have the kind of extensibility available with Boxee. I like the application links in Boxee and services like Pandora or Last.fm seem useful. WMC can't do this.
But where everything shows itself as inferior to Tivo is in the day-to-day user experience. Tivo consistently works the way I expect it to, letting me focus on my viewing experience without thinking about my media player. If I took the time to be methodical about it, I could probably write up a few dozen features that work better in Tivo than in WMC. Here are a couple of examples:
1) Even though I have two tuners in my HTPC, there's no way to swap between them. With the Tivo, I might swap between the 10:00 news on one channel and Good Eats on another channel five or six times in an hour (thereby avoiding commercials, even though I'm "caught up" with the recording time). Swapping from one tuner to the other with the Tivo involved a quick sequence of a) Pause current, b) Swap tuners, and c) Play new.
To accomplish that use case with WMC, I would have to press Record the first time I land on each program - WMC doesn't have a notion of buffering video that you haven't explicitly set to record. Then, at each swap, I have to Pause, then go to the Recorded TV menu and reselect the alternate program and select Play from the menu. At the end, I need to delete both programs because they were stored on the hard drive, not just temporarily buffered like on the Tivo. Menus and increased button presses make the transition much more disruptive.
2) Let's say you record a program that runs from 8:00 to 8:30. You don't have any other recordings scheduled that evening for either tuner. At 8:20, you go to your recorded items list and start watching your recorded program from the beginning. At about 8:42, you've finished watching your 30 minute program (only about 22 minutes because you skipped commercials), and you decide you'll just keep watching what comes on next.
On the Tivo, this works great. Just keep watching. The Tivo will have already buffered the first 12 minutes of your next show so you can conveniently jump ahead when you want. Ahh. Very nice.
With WMC, you've already missed the first 12 minutes of the next program. Despite the fact that you haven't asked either tuner to record anything, they haven't bothered to do anything useful with their spare time.
I could go on. In short, though, Tivo has done an excellent job with their UI design. It's very thoughtfully done making for a great user experience. I don't think anyone can compete with Tivo on this front.
And despite the fact that I spent about $900 (all in) building the HTPC, I'm thinking about demoting it to an ordinary home PC and switching to one of these new Tivos.