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Aug. 24th, 2002 09:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerGoddamit, I love Tivo.
I was given one by my glorious parents, and I haven't got the controller for the cable box, so I can't program it to grab "Every episode of the Simpsons" or "Everything directed by Terry Gilliam" yet, but I can use the pause Live TV option, which has proved incredibly useful. Erin left for a show at 8:45, so I just hit pause, and Smallville stopped. I came back to the tv ten minutes later, rewinded for 30 seconds, and hit play, bingo, back where I had been. I'm in a bit of a state of shock at the ease at which I can suddenly get around the annoyance of people phoning during tv, and I can definitely see this becoming a "can't live without" feature in a very short space of time.
Having looked forward to the Tivo for aaages (I've wanted one since they first appeared), it was a slight letdown when I actually got one - nothing could have been as cool as the hype, but now I've actually played with it for a bit, I can see that it's going to be incredibly cool to have.
I was given one by my glorious parents, and I haven't got the controller for the cable box, so I can't program it to grab "Every episode of the Simpsons" or "Everything directed by Terry Gilliam" yet, but I can use the pause Live TV option, which has proved incredibly useful. Erin left for a show at 8:45, so I just hit pause, and Smallville stopped. I came back to the tv ten minutes later, rewinded for 30 seconds, and hit play, bingo, back where I had been. I'm in a bit of a state of shock at the ease at which I can suddenly get around the annoyance of people phoning during tv, and I can definitely see this becoming a "can't live without" feature in a very short space of time.
Having looked forward to the Tivo for aaages (I've wanted one since they first appeared), it was a slight letdown when I actually got one - nothing could have been as cool as the hype, but now I've actually played with it for a bit, I can see that it's going to be incredibly cool to have.
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Date: 2002-08-24 03:55 pm (UTC)Forgive me: I don't watch TV, read newspapers, or go downtown if I can avoid it.
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Date: 2002-08-25 03:09 am (UTC)A Tivo is basically a tv decoder and a hard disk. So all tv input goes through it on the way to the tv. It then keeps a 'buffer' of about half an hour, so that at any time I can press pause, and it keeps recording. Then, when I unpause it keeps playing from the buffer, while still recording the 'present' so that I can catch up (eventually). The half hour buffer also means I can come in 5 minutes into a show (providing it happened to be on the right channel) and then rewind 5 minutes into the buffer to see the show from the start.
If that isn't enough, it also downloads a tv guide, and allows you to (for instance) say "Record all of the simpsons on this week. And all of Buffy", it'll then look for conflicts and try to schedule around them using any repeats. So I can then sit down and say "Right, what's been grabbed recently?" and watch whatever TV it's automatically picked up for me. I can finally not worry about setting videos, or missing shows. As I'm somewhat anal about tv (I don't watch much, but if I'm watching it, I want to see it in order, from the beginning, not missing any plot), it's a godsend.
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Date: 2002-08-28 05:26 pm (UTC)