TiVo HD or Tivo Premiere vs Ceton HTPC - Page 2

For the moment, the price is going to be driven by the demand for the tuners and the quantity the manufacturer can supply. I fully expect the first production run to sell out fairly quickly. I've never liked being an early adopter for any new technology so this is a first for me. When you consider the monthly costs plus the initial investment for the hardware, the Ceton quad tuner beats two series 3 Tivos hands down. The cost of lifetime service for a single Tivo Premiere or XL is $399 and you still have to pay the monthly cableCARD fees. Add in the cost of the Tivo hardware and you're looking at $650-700 or more for only two tuners!

I can't justify a $400 cable card tuner...

I can right now get the Tivo Premier for $99 and the Premier XL for $299...at those prices with $10 a month subscription, why would I want to pay around $1k for an htpc, so I could record more and have to deal with driver issues...no thanks

Maybe because it could cost less (in the long run) and give you more capability. You'd need to buy 2 Tivos and lifetime subscriptions for both to be roughly equivalent to a Windows 7 Media Center PC with the Ceton card. So 2 Premier XL's would be $600 (I'm assuming $300 is a discounted price you found), plus 2 lifetime subs at $400 for the first and $300 for the 2nd for a total of around $1300 (yes, you could save money by going with the less expensive Tivo option, but you cripple your storage capacity). Including the Ceton card, you could put together a really nice PC for less than that, have all 4 tuners in 1 box (that's a huge benefit if you ever get into a situation where there are more than 2 things on that you want to watch), and only have to rent a single Cablecard. If you pay Tivo on a monthly basis, the savings is more over the long run.

For a fairly reasonable extra cost, the PC can also be a pretty nice Bluray player and do a bunch of other stuff such as being a much more flexible media player than the Tivos.

The downside of going with a HTPC is the extra effort it takes to get up and running and it can easily get expensive depending on what options you go with.

bimmerfreak0, where did you see the Premiere at the $99 and XL at $299?

Not exactly, 2 Tivos would serve 2 TV's. With a PC solution you need some type of extender for the 2nd set.

That's a $200 Xbox 360 Arcade, so you have to budget an extra $200 for the second TV.

As far as that goes, it all depends on what you're looking to do. In my case, the primary goal would be to have enough tuners to record the shows I care about rather than feeding more than 1 TV - 2 tuners isn't enough 1 or 2 nights a week during TV season. Having 1 recording list to manage is also a HUGE advantage.

Or close to $150 extra if you keep an eye out for a deal on the Arcade. I just picked one up for around that price from Dell through a discount program my company has.

My point was that the PC solution isn't as expensive as bimmerfreak0 was eluding to - yeah, the Ceton card will be $400, but the Tivo's aren't exactly cheap once you factor in either monthly service fees or lifetime subscriptions. And you can't really directly compare a single Tivo with 2 tuners to a 4 tuner solution. It's also expected that the 2 tuner version of the Ceton card (and the Silicon Dust box) will be significantly less than $400 - I believe Silicon Dust has announced around $250 for theirs.

Also, with a PC you can expand capacity at will. You'll always be limited with a Tivo.

You can stuff as many hard drives as you want in your case, add USB drives, swap them at will, archive shows to DVD (a file copy...not DVD Video format) or BD-R, move shows around between drives to manage space. The encrypted shows will still be tied to that PC if the copy-once flag is enabled, but at least you can back them up. The copy freely shows...you can do whatever you want with those (put them on your phone, make a DVD-Video or AVCHD...the options are limitless. I've tried the TivoToGo...it's crap...content protection is overbearing. Then don't forget mass deletes to clear out old shows (one at a time for Tivo with a clunky interface).

As someone that's been down the Tivo or CableCo DVR routes...the PC version is cheaper over the long run, has a better interface, more options, and is sharable across your entire home with extenders. Media Center's usability makes Tivo look like the 1999 software it is. The Premiere is a joke...a 320GB drive...in 2010. that'll hold maybe a months worth of TV unless you only record SD or something.

I'm rocking a CableCARD tuner, ClearQAM tuners, 6 TB of hard drive space (ONE THOUSAND HD HOURS) along with extenders. There's nothing on the market or on the horizon that will even compare to that. Sure it was difficult to set up due to the Cable Company, but totally worth it. You'll still have that difficulty on a Tivo...even more actually.

Absolutely. My PC that does all the recording is in a Norco 4220 case and currently has 13TB of space and still has room for 11 more hot swap drives so I've got plenty of room for growth . Now where's that Ceton card I preordered?

One of the few lasting benefits of working at Circuit City...they never removed the employees that had originally done tivo training...

sellmoretivo.com

And btw, for "us" the lifetime subscription is $199 I believe...

I'm thinking the sweet spot might be Silicon Dust HD cablecard tuner, if it ever comes out, and is ~$150 or so. I don't need 4 tuners, and it will be nice to have a network tuner that I can use with the htpc, my laptop, pc etc.

Iirc, tentative pricing for the dual-tuner is $250. Still reasonable, imho.

You should go back and research the new Silicondust CC tuner a little more carefully. You likely won't have the same network flexibility the current HDHomeRun has as it will be tied to a single PC.


True, but at least you CAN expand a Tivo vs. any other DVR.


If your content is protected in a Tivo it's going to be protected on your HTPC as well. The anti-copy flag is set by the provider and not the Tivo. FWIW, I'm on FIOS and don't have those issues. I could be wrong, but I don;t believe you have the copy flag issues if you hack your Tivo for direct extraction (and I do). You also get much faster transfer rates.


LOL. 320GB would hold maybe two weeks' worth of recording for me. Both my S3 Tivos have external expansion drives for hundreds of hours of HD recording time. I've also expanded the internal drives for even more capacity. I can expand up to about 1GB per tuner.


Setting up a cablecard in a Tivo vs. a CC tuner is exactly the same. The setup on my two S3 Tivos went smooth as silk. BTW, when will you find the time to actually watch 1,000 hours of recorded content? Just because you can have that much capacity doesn't mean you should. Just don't whine when a drive dies and you lose it all. You might want to get out and into the sunlight once in a while.

Iirc, from press releases and forum posts from SiliconDust staff, you can still use it on multiple computers. The recordings, however, will only be viewable on the computer it was recorded.

Just dropped in here to see what's new in the HTPC world (I'm always waiting for the holy grail, and the Ceton sounds worth investigation), and I'm wondering for those of you tired of recurring fees from Tivo & CC dvrs, and not completely sure about htpc - why not the Moxi?

3 Tuners, M-card support, no subscription, multi room extender boxes, eSata expansion, blah, blah...

Is there a particular love for Tivo that can't be overcome?

These CE manufacturers and the morons at Microsoft just don't get it, do they??

- If you're considering a simple multi room setup for basically watching TV and sharing your recordings, the flucking cable and fios boxes do that ALREADY, and they are free. duh!

- If you are considering a more complex multi room solution for NOT JUST live and recorded TV, but also sharing your DVD library, video files, music etc etc, then none of these freakin devices do it! And Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, has crippled their extenders.

WTF were they thinking?? Someone needs to beat these guys over their head with a baseball bat.

huh. Not for me.
I paid around $17/mo for quite a few years for a cable box which had no multi room or sharing capabilities.

Maybe you have a super awesome cable franchise?

I need other gear... so I got a Moxi (it's been great), and I will also go the htpc route as soon as I find the right feature set that suits my desires...

Comcast/Fios etc, regularly run specials, where they give out 6/12 months free boxes (atleast here in the DC area), or they discount the cable price, so the boxes are in effect free.

My point is that paying $600 for a single box (not even including the other room boxes) vs even paying $17 to the cable company, will have an ROI of THREE YEARS. Yup. 3 years of paying for your cable box will equal one Moxi box. Hell, you could put the $600 in a 2% CD, and even make money over those 3 years.

If these boxes allowed you to do OTHER things, besides just TV, it makes sense, but for just TV? Hell no.

Not all of them. Perhaps some set-top boxes support multi-room viewing, but you can't just make a blanket statement that all of them do. I've never seen any of our Scientific Atlanta DVR boxes do multi-room.

Another thing, not all service providers are the same. While you might get good deals in your area, other people might not be so lucky. No, it's not just a matter of not being good at bargaining. Sometimes you just get sucky customer service reps.

However, I just couldn't swallow paying $600 for a Moxi or TiVo when I can build an HTPC for around the same price or less and be able to do more things with it.

It's all very personal, and any economic arguments utilizing ROI are a bit off base (for me, personally) - because I cannot get the features I want from either my cable franchise nor the satellite providers. (I cannot get multi-room, I cannot get DLNA, I cannot get transcoded media; those are facts)

But here's my calculus: I spend $115 per month, every month for "just television". I've done so for many, many years, and unless something dramatic changes, I will continue to do so. If I assume a 4 year hardware cycle (quite conservative) for any hardware STB/HTPC, thats $5580 I've spend on cable TV service in that same 48 month time frame (assuming no rate increases!).

If I spend $1000 on hardware (which I already have), I see that as additional 18% over the cost of service ($1000/$5580). Is it worth 18% above what I already pay to distribute to multiple rooms, gain a DLNA client, get a more stable device, gain online scheduling, get the encrypted HD channels I pay for in the "other" rooms? For me, the answer is a resounding "yes".

I wouldn't bat an eye to spend $1000 on the TV set itself, so why would I sweat the cost of a STB/HTPC? In fact, I find the outlay for STB/HTPC to be much, much easier to justify than the cost for service or the television. But hey - that's just me.

Finally, if I continue to spend $17/mo on a CC supplied DVR -that's a total of $816 over that 4 year period (again, assuming no rate increases!).

So, to summarize: I can spend an 18% premium on my programming feed to get it, with DVR functionality to all rooms, for a total of $1000 -OR- I can spend a minimum of $816 over a 4 year period. Wow. I can save a whopping $183 over 4 years to rent an old tech DVR that's restricted to my living room, can store about 35 hours of programming, doesn't allow me to watch my premium channels in any other room(!) and has no online scheduler or any advanced feature... and never will.

*scratch*

I'll be interested to see the Ceton card and how I can distribute to extender devices. I'll happily spend another $1000 to improve what I already have.

My friend, it's not just the "cost" that's the issue. Most folks here spend more on hard drives than the average joe spends on TV in 5 years...

It's the "features" that justify the additional cost. However.....let's talk about this for a second. You say:


Let's take a basic example of 5 viewing areas, with one of them being the main and 4 additional viewing areas. Let's talk about Moxi first (since you were the one who brought it up. ).

Cost:

Main unit - $499 (I'm doing apples to apples, so just a 2 tuner unit, which is typical in cable/fios boxes).
Moxi mate - $299 (need 4 of them)

Total cost = $1695.

Now, just what DO you get for this $1700?? From a functional perspective, it's a DVR, a multi room DVR for sure, but basically a DVR. Sure they have online scheduling, widgets and tickers, and all kinds of funky things, but the basic function is TV viewing.

Now, what if you wanted to watch DVDs in those 5 viewing areas?? 5 DVD players? What if you wanted to watch video files in those areas? 5 digital media players? or 5 Digital media players that can potentially handle both videos and DVDs (and maybe photos etc)? What would that cost? Another $200 a unit, maybe? Blu Ray in all 5 areas?? 5 BD players?

That's another $1000. And even then your overall "experience" isn't optimal, since there's no single integrated UI, and your display device/receiver still has to switch between different sources, you have to calibrate your display for different inputs, manage audio from different inputs, a whole basket of remotes and what not...

Is this scenario any different with Tivo? Nope. Exact same crap. And it's the same exact crap, if you have the cable/fios boxes EXCEPT you haven't shelled out $1700 to begin with. Unless you find a deal, the boxes will probably be around $15-$20 per box per month. That's $75-$100 a month just for the freakin boxes on top of your programming cost.

Which would end up costing you the same as Moxi in about 18 months

Now, is that a "good" solution? Hell no.

The whole point of "technological innovation" is to make things easier and hopefully cheaper. Enter HTPC.

We're in a blissful HTPC era where you can build a HD/BD capable HTPC for peanuts. I'll say you can probably build a good "main" HTPC for around $500. And for the other 4 viewing areas get extenders! which are fairly cheap! Problem solved? Hell no. Now, the extenders will do TV, quite nicely, but they throw up when it comes to anything other than TV and pictures. Gotta go through all sorts of hoops to get video files playing, and transcoding for DVDs and what not. I still (to this day) have never understood Microsoft's infinite wisdom in crippling the extenders. I do not know WTF they are smoking over there, or may be it's the air in Redmond that makes em a bit stupid.

So, the solution? Build 5 HTPCs?? Well, apart from the fact that it's gonna cost $2500 now, now, you have no central guide support and centralized recording support that you did with the extenders.WHAT? Yup. Microsoft in more of their infinite wisdom have crippled Media Center, so that one MC can't talk to another one and share tuners and guide. Somebody REALLY needs to beat them up.

So, what's the solution?? There is NO solution.

^^ Sure there is, get rid of tv and get a real hobby.

lol...well, that's not really a solution, but my backup hobby IS playing with bimmers.. Have had 4 over the years. The current one (an E38) is undergoing a complete AV overhaul. Guess what I'm putting in it...yup, a PC.

You're acting like setting up transcoding or ripping to a specific format is hard. It isn't and you know it. Pair Win7 Mediacenter with the Ceton tuner, a couple of XBox 360s and install AnydvdHD, Mediabrowser and your favorite ripping software and you're done. I have a whole home system that allows me to watch live tv, recorded tv, bluray/dvd rips, listen to music, view pictures and a whole bunch of other stuff throughout my house. It doesn't take a rocket scientist. Half the battle is knowing enough to come to this forum or thegreenbutton.com to resolve specific issues. When I get my ceton tuner, I'll be paying $2 per month for my cablecard. Bonus, I'll get to sell my two ATI cablecard tuners too. HTPCs destroy Tivo and Moxis. I also get to play games with the 360s as well.

kapone,

you are a very strange cat.
You believe there is no solution to a conundrum that you describe... (not sure anyone else agrees with)
What is your point? Why do you post here? What are you contributing to the conversation?

You are describing my needs without knowing anything about them. I don't watch DVD's or BR. I don't need or want 5 TVs. I could go on, but you get the point.

I'm not saying this with any malice - I just don't understand what your point is.

My goal of reading this thread is to get an idea of what other people are successfully doing to enjoy their TV & their related media.
I have my current solution, but I'm always looking to improve it. I have to be honest, I'm not that moved by peoples hypothetical, or future solutions. IMO, until you've actually done it, you haven't done it.

check out dynavin

http://www.dynavin.com/products/bmw.php

Not too far off from a car pc but way better looking for integration (OEM look)

Me, too. I pre-ordered mine and hopefully I'll have it installed and then do my experimenting in the first few days of June.

Personally, I never saw the need for distributing my recordings throughout the entire house. I watch everything I record on a single TV in my Home Theater setup. Occasionally my wife and I watch a few shows that we both like or perhaps an occasional movie but our tastes in shows are totally different. That's why she has her own flat screen in the bedroom and I have mine in the basement. If there's something we both want to watch I'll make a point of recording it for viewing on the main TV. We rarely watch the TV in the family room and my son has his own TV in his room that he mostly uses for playing video games online with his pals.

My point is, not everyone feels the need for whole house distribution of recorded video, making most of these arguments moot for many of us. If it's important to you then perhaps the Ceton tuner isn't in your future. It'll suit my needs just fine, which is why I've got my pre-order in.

I don't know who your point was directed to, but for speaking for myself, my reaction is that the Ceton card might be the absolutely perfect way to distribute both recorded and live TV streams to multiple viewing locations.

In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that I see it as overkill, and a waste of capabilities and money if you didn't do so!

How's that for seeing the world in a completely different way?

I am looking at ways of reducing hardware and cost for Pay TV and things may change again in 6-10 months since Google TV is likely down the road. However my focus is finally being able to watch encrypted channels in HD on my HTPC.

I have mentioned before (maybe I have) that we might go without NFL Sunday Ticket yet again this season (Oakland Raider Fans) so there's really no reason for the Dish(es) and all the boxes (2 DVR's, 4 SD Rv) if the only advantage to Direct TV is the NFL package.

We could downgrade to TWC with 2-3 packages and save $70-80 a month.

Here's my plan -

Setup a main HTPC to serve the house, I will continue to use my own PC for local media,

If I got (2) of these Ceton tuners, I would have 8 streams available correct?

I don't think all 8 streams will be used at once. My father hardly records anything even with a DVR and my mother only records a few shows at the most.

My sister doesn't have a DVR so I assume she's not interested in recording/placeshifting, I haven't asked but she's never requested a DVR either.

I wanted to keep my machine local, for several reasons....

The most I would record at once maybe 3 or 4 streams and I doubt all 8 streams would be used all at once.

Out of all the things I watch, I hardly have any clashes as it is.

So I guess could I build a server and put both tuners in there, plus dual ATSC tuners?

If so, I could then use an extender on the rest of the TV's correct? There isn't a extended limitation on Windows is there?

Thanks