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Old 05-07-2003, 11:23 AM   #4
SteveDallas
Your Bartender
 
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: Philly Burbs, PA
Posts: 7,651
Damn straight. Mine came with a 40GB drive and I added an 80GB to the second drive bay. At the same time I made an image of the original drive so if (when) I do have a crash I can restore that image to a fresh drive. The info is all on the web. The one thing I screwed up is that I didn't plug in the cooling fan. Within about 5 hours it had shut itself down and was displaying a temperature warning. All in all, a pretty clever box.

Other features: You can search the guide and save searches. For example: I can ask it to find every show in which Emma Thompson appears. If I feel like it, I can have it automatically record those shows. Ditto for keywords--I'm not watching TV much these days, but for a while I had a keyword search for "EGYPT*". It not only picked up archaeology documentaries from PBS and The History Channel, but also Liz Taylor in Cleopatra, Abbott and Costello vs. The Mummy, etc. The guide information isn't perfect, but it's pretty complete--I've had it pick up shows for particular actors when the only thing that person had was a 15-second guest spot as Third Extra From The Left.

As you can imagine, using this sort of setup for a while really tends to erode your loyalty to particular channels!

Oh, one more thing I should say: if you are at all interested in satellite TV, you should look at combined units. You can currently get a combo Tivo/DirecTV receiver. (Dish Network, the other big satellite company, makes its own personal video recorder products; some people like them, some don't.) This is what I have. It has two tuners, which means I can watch a show I've already recorded while the box records 2 different shows at once! But the thing about a combo system is, one of the most expensive components of a Tivo or other PVR is the MPEG encoding chip. With DirecTV or Dish Network, all the content is MPEG-encoded at the headend before it's piped out to the satellites. So a combination PVR/satellite box needs no MPEG encoder, and is paradoxically cheaper than a standalone Tivo.
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