(First thread lost in the hack) Well if you guys remember I mentioned that I was going to try and turn my computer into a TiVo rather than buy an actual TiVo. Well I got a ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder for $160 from Best Buy and this thing is worth every penny. I'd like to know who it was that said they tried this but had some problems so just went ahead and bought a Tivo, what kind of problems were you having? I can record programs with no problem at all, pause/rewind/fast forward live TV etc... It's really cool especially since it came with a remote that you can use with things other than just the TV part cause you can use it as a mouse, w/ winamp, powerpoint, etc... Only drawback is that I have to have my computer on whenever I want to record something, but I usually have it on anyways, so no big deal. CPU performance suprisingly doesn't slow at all either like I thought it might. My friend just got her boyfriend a TiVo for christmas, so I'm sure I'll be over there to check it out and be able to make a better comparison.
OK, some TiVo advice requested. I've had mine for a week, and I'm trying to "teach" it to give me better suggestions. So far it's been disastrous. Examples: -- Get a Premiership season pass & give EPL on FSW thumbs-up, and it recommends not other soccer shows but every Spanish-language variety show. It totally ignored the College Cup finals this weekend, deciding instead to tape Sabado Gigante. -- Season Pass for CBS Sunday Morning (one of my wife's favorite shows) and it recommends every newscast. And I mean, EVERY newscast: News at 5 am, news at 6 am, the network morning programs, news at noon, news at 5 pm, news at 6 pm, news at 11 pm, overnight news, 6-hour blocks of CNN Headline News, Spanish News, French News, and every two-bit Fox News feature show. -- Request a recording of Spike Lee's Bamboozled and it recommends three dozen movies on Black Starz. -- Record Oasis Live At Wembley and put Sessions At West 54th on a Wish List, and it recommends the overnight rap hour on BET and call-in shows on CMT. -- Add the PBS shows Frontline and Nova to a season pass, and it recommends half of the programming on Animal Planet. I thought that these things would work themselves out after 2-3 days of thumbs-downing stuff, but this morning I turn on the TV and it's the same crap. It's gotten a few things right in terms of what I want it to recommend (mostly documentaries, indie / foreign films) but 98% of the suggestions list is terrible. Is it always going to be like this?
It'll get better. Mine was suggesting all kinds of weird stuff early on. Perhaps you can go thru the Suggestions list every few days and give some ups and downs to things there. I don't give many downs, and I get pretty good suggestions. I just thumb up things I record and like.
Lucid Got a few questions, what kind of connection do you need to have for Tv to Cpu? How close do your Tv and cpu have to be? What kind of processor do you have? thanks!
That's awesome, I was thinking about doing that too, so I can burn my World Cup games onto DVD. Would it work with other video cards as long as you have the right hook-up equipment? Is this ATI Radeon specifically for this?
Well, keep giving thumbs up and thumbs down to things and it'll gradually get better. Like Foosinho suggested, go into the "TiVo's Suggestions" menu in the "Pick Programs to Record" menu and rate the stuff that it's suggesting and that it'll probably evenutally record. If you go ahead and give something on that list a thumbs down, then TiVo won't even bother to record it. When we first got our TiVo, it was suggesting a lot of horror movies and programs because my wife had given thumbs up to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel." But some judicious use of the thumbs down button on the programs that TiVo was suggesting quickly solved that problem. Of course, after several months of doing this, my TiVo has gotten to the point where it 95% of the stuff that it suggests is stuff I've already give a thumbs up. But the other 5% is stuff that's somewhere in the ballpark of stuff that I like. But it doesn't matter much to me anyway. I turned off the auto-record of TiVo Suggestions in the setup menu. I got plenty of stuff to watch without having to worry about watch the stuff that TiVo thinks that I might like. Oh, and unlike Foosinho, I'm pretty liberal with the thumbs down button. The stuff that I hate with the fire of a thousand burning suns, like "Paid Programming" and "Family Matters," were pretty easy 3 thumbs-down items. But a program that's not bad, but that I'll never voluntarily watch, like Trans World Sport, I'll give a single thumbs-down.
Well I'll try to answer your questions at the same time... There are a lot of TV cards out there and they all mainly do the same thing, show TV on your PC and it's pretty much all the same. The difference comes in the added features for the cards. You can get one that just shows TV for probably like $30, or you can spend $500 on the new ATI Radeon AIW 9700 that is a kick-ass video card + TV card with HDTV support all in one. If you want to do this what I would suggest is look around, alot, and you will familiarize yourself with what features comes on what cards. I have a Pentium 4 1.4 Ghz machine with 128 megs ram and an 80 gig 7200 RPM Hard drive. The only time my system slows down is when I am playing non-live TV, meaning when I pause it and play it back minutes later, rewind, etc... Right now I'm recording something off of TV and can't even tell. A 7200 RPM drive is best I would think for some of the more intensive features of this card (playing non-live TV, etc...) and it's gotta be BIG, cause for example, I just recorded The Junction Boys off of ESPN with a little less than TV quality and it is 2 gigs. I need to familiarize myself with the recording codecs a little more cause there's about 20 of them as presets, and you can customize your own too. They range anywhere quality-wise from a splotchy 56k streaming type to DVD quality and the size ranges anywhere from 10 megs to 50 gigs for a half hour program. I haven't made VCD's though you can record straight to VCD compatible compression scheme's which is very handy cause if you have ever tried to make a VCD from the wrong compression scheme, you understand the pain it is to convert it. I used to have my computer on one side of my room and my entertainment center on the other, well with the features of this card I just basically moved my entertainment center right next to my computer. Why? Cause this card allows you to use your TV as another monitor in a dual-monitor setup and therefore, twice the workspace, it is so awesome. OOn of my friend's first reaction was "Holy s**t dude, you can watch two different porns at the same time now!" This part of my room is a mess of cords right now cause with my Stereo, TV, VCR, Speakers, Computer, all hooked up one way or another to pretty much everything else, it's nuts. I'm lost as to what is hooked up to what now, lol. If you aren't so computer savvy, something like this card might drive you a little crazy cause it's kind of handy to know stuff about video compression, etc... but they make it easy enough so that it isn't neccesary. It's a lot cheaper than Tivo, but it's not as easy or convinient. But I think the $160 I spent for this card is worth every penny. If you go this route I would go the Radeon AIW route because it's the best out there with the best features and you really aren't paying much more for it. I think the 7500 All-in-wonders (there is the 7500, 8500, and now 9700) came out about two years ago and you can find them for about $100. I think the TV features are all just about the same, it's just the video card portion of it that isn't as good nowadays. You can go the route of buying a ATI Radeon video card and a ATI TV Wonder as two seperate cards, but you lose the ability to pause live TV and play it back. But the upside is you half to pay about half as much to upgrade your video card vs. me where I'll have to buy a whole new All-in-Wonder card with the same TV features if I want to just upgrade my video card. Ok, I think that explains most of it. Sorry for the long post but I figured I'd just throw everytihing out there that I'd learned over the past month researching what exactly I wanted.
It takes time. Keep using the thumbs up/down for everything and if you really want a show then create a season pass. If it records something you don't like then make sure to use the thumbs down. Don't count on the TiVo getting a program for you. If it's important, make a season pass. Get a season pass for ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC for the word soccer. Set up keyword wishlists and browse upcoming programs every once in a while. Give it time and keep rating every show you can with a thumbs up or down.