TiVo To Go

There is a lot of news going around my house­hold in this New Year. Not the least of which is the fact that tomor­row is the last day of my job at URS Cor­po­ra­tion or that I have sev­er­al new gad­gets that don’t entire­ly work! That’s all for anoth­er time, though. This post is all about the TiVo.

TiVo announced the TiVo To Go ser­vice way back in Jan­u­ary of ’04 and final­ly rolled it out on Mon­day. Well, they sort of rolled it out. They post­ed an updat­ed ver­sion of TiVo desk­top on their site and the newest ver­sion of the TiVo soft­ware will include the capa­bil­i­ties. Of course, the sched­uled down­loads for the box soft­ware don’t occur imme­di­ate­ly. The best you can hope for is request­ing pri­or­i­ty and you might get it in the next few weeks. Fur­ther, there’s no Mac sup­port as of yet.

Now, to be able to burn your record­ed shows from your PC (again, not Mac as of yet) to DVD, you’ll use Son­ic’s MyD­VD v6.1, which was announced yes­ter­day. I had a copy of MyD­VD that was pre-loaded on my Dell Dimen­sion 4600 Media Cen­ter PC. I did­n’t real­ly care for the inter­face, so I nev­er real­ly used it much. I pur­chased Nero 6 as soon as I got the PC and have used it ever since, espe­cial­ly since Nero soon added sup­port for Microsoft­’s .dvr-ms for­mat mpeg video. That aside, a soon there-after bought a Plex­tor PX-708A DVD Burn­er and after a cou­ple of frus­trat­ing days, final­ly learned that MyD­VD + PX-708A = mem­o­ry dump. Bad. 

Son­ic’s site lists the PX-708A as com­pat­i­ble hard­ware, so hope­ful­ly that prob­lem’s fixed now. None-the-less, this is now one more piece of soft­ware that does some­thing that anoth­er piece of soft­ware I already own does, with the excep­tion of one tiny task which will cost around $50. Not to sound cheap, but why can’t TiVo and Nero get togeth­er on this as well? Since Bill Gates announced at CES ear­li­er today that Microsoft­’s going to sup­port TiVo ToGo in Win­dows soft­ware, why can’t Nero be on board?

I’m addict­ed to TiVo and desparate­ly want the abil­i­ty to get my video files to and from the machine to some net­work stor­age or my PC. How­ev­er, I’m not crazy about buy­ing anoth­er piece of soft­ware that I was­n’t impressed with before to replace some soft­ware that I real­ly like.

Last­ly, on the TiVo front, they’ve been tak­ing a lot of flack over their sol­lu­tion to skip­ping over adver­tis­ing. The idea is that when you fast-for­ward through 2 min­utes (or so) of com­mer­i­cals, a sta­t­ic ban­ner ad will pop up on the screen. Frankly, I don’t care so long as it does­n’t eat up my band­width. I’m watch­ing peo­ple zip around the screen at 4x FF, what do I care if an ad is slapped over that? Ads are every­where, and good ads are an art­form. Peo­ple get too upset over adver­tis­ing to real­ize that when done right (and whose to say this won’t be), it helps the cus­tomer con­nect with a sup­pli­er. It does appear that some peo­ple seem to agree that this is a non-issue, and I think that no one is goign to get rid of their TiVo based on this. Fur­ther, this is a whole lot more ten­able than the Sen­ate’s stu­pid sol­lu­tion to mak­ing fast-for­ward ille­gal!

After doing some fur­ther read­ing, I thought I’d post this link to a response on the TiVo com­mer­cial skip stuff from one of the prod­uct man­agers at TiVo.

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Categorized as Geek

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

1 comment

  1. Even though I haven’t read this post, I thought I would com­ment on the site in gen­er­al. It’s look­ing good. Also, I’m test­ing to see if I can comment.

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