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I have been a fan of TiVo for a long time. However, when TiVo was dumped by DirecTV I was forced to give up TiVo. I eventually switched to Dish Network and still miss TiVo. Every single proprietary DVR I have tried has sucked (cable and Sat). MythTV might be a decent choice, but since I mostly watch HD stuff on Satellite I don't think that is a viable option yet.

So, what is the status of MythTV and HD satellite programming? Will MythTV ever be able to do HD programming on US Satellite TV?

Is anyone using TiVo with US Satellite TV and HD programming?

Will TiVo survive or will they perish from all the proprietary competition?

Good topic. We're planning on doing an episode of the current status of HD & MythTV in an upcoming episode. Right now cable tv and OTA (over the air) transmissions are the better choice for HD. The Hauppauge PVR-1212 is poised to become the best HD capture device:
http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_HD-PVR

It will record via h.264 encoder in real time in either 1080i or 720p via the component out (HD video) and optical audio out(5.1 digital audio) connections. It will officially be supported in the upcoming 0.22 release of MythTV.

That being said playback of recordings made with the PVR-1212 are fairly CPU intensive. A workaround might be VDPAU support in the newer Nvidia graphics cards which will offload most of the playback processing to the GPU. Development and testing of VDPAU is still ongoing:
http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Vdpau

It would be nice if the sat providers had to provide decrypt cards like the cable co has to... That would be a step in the right direction too...

jstgtpaid wrote:It would be nice if the sat providers had to provide decrypt cards like the cable co has to... That would be a step in the right direction too...

From what I hear the cable cards are a major clusterfuck. Depending on your cable provider the level of difficulty to set everything up correctly varies greatly.

You can still use TiVo's with DirecTV. We have an HR10-250 HD unit still and a couple of the SD DirecTV TiVo's.

Mind you we do have two of the newer HR20 HD units also that directv makes, and I will be honest they have gotten to the point that they are pretty darn nice.

Actually DirecTV and TiVo announced awhile back that TiVo is making a new DVR for DirecTV users. So in a year or so you should see a new DirecTV capable TiVo.

I am a huge TiVo fan so I am interested in this new DVR (probably a year off), but am happy with the HR20's right now. They are very fast. The UI is not as nice as TiVo but you can set season passes, organize them, and do it all very quick.

The DirecTV HR20 family of units has some newer features added too like remote scheduling over the web, ON Demand downloads from the internet right to the hard drive, support of UPNP DLNA servers (for audio and video playback), ability to view content from the DVR's on your PC (currently Windows only, but hopefully some Linux hackers figure it out). They are looking at the ability to share videos from all HR20 family DVR's on any other ones in the house too (over the network). There is also a open beta test feature where if you follow the dbstalk forums you are alerted to beta versions of software for the various HR20's. You can reboot your receiver during the beta test download windows (usually 11pm - 1am EST) on specified nights and hit some codes on your remote as you reboot to force the download of the beta software. Has been great for DirecTV to get feedback on new features. If you don't like the beta or have problems with it, just reboot and force a download outside the beta window to get the normal release version.

Mind you I really love TiVo's but even their new HD units for OTA and cable/cablecard reception don't have as snappy a UI as I would like. I started using TiVo's way back when they had their first 14 hour unit. In fact I was the guy who wrote BlessTiVo which was the first program (it was a linux program too obviously) to automate formatting a second drive for your TiVo to allow users to expand their TiVo's storage. Even got interviewed by CNET way back.

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-244104.html

So I am eagerly watching to see what this new TiVO DirecTV unit will be like. I am hoping it has the multi room viewing, remote scheduling, PC viewing (and we can get it working with Linux), etc. But I fear DirecTV won't let TiVo put something out with all those features to put it on par with their own units, and have that TiVo interface.

Regardless you can still use TiVo's on DirecTV. But honestly the current DirecTV units are pretty nice, and are really fast. One of my favorite features is for setting up a season pass you just highlight the show in the guide, click record and it is set to record that one show. Click record a second time and it automatically sets up a season pass to get em all. You can tweak the season pass later if you want to change how many it keeps, if it should get reruns, etc. But I just set the defaults to be what I normally want, so when I do the two click record I have a season pass in a second. Also when you reorganize your season passes and exit that screen it rearranges and exits immediately. The TiVo has that "please wait" message that take a minute or so depending on your season pass size.

Another nice feature is if you have a bunch of shows recorded from a season pass and you want to dump them off to your PC with a capture card (be it SD or HD capture) you highlight the season pass folder with all the episodes in it, and instead of going into the folder to play specific episodes you just hit the play button on that highlighted folder and it plays all the shows for that season pass that have been recorded one after the other. So you can set your capture card to record a long block of time and get all them in one capture. I use this for our littlest one when I record a bunch of her favorite cartoons , knock out the commercials and put the files on my server so she can have easy access to them.

I remember seeing on the dbstalk forum a picture of a Microsoft testing lab with a bunch of DirecTV receivers that connect to a PC. It is a product that exists, but has never been brought to market yet.

Also an unrelated tip (to an already long post).

Costco has a Philips DVD player that is an upconverting player. So it has HDMI outputs and all. But it works equally well with SD TV's. Nice thing about it is that it plays videos in file format on media also (be it a burnt CD, DVD, or USB device). I have thrown DiVx files at it, MP4 videos, and even a few WMV files and it has played them all. You can also plug a USB memory stick or USB hard drive into it and play any of those files off that device also. It is around $40 -$50 or so. Does MP3 and all that jazz too. DVP-5992 is the model number. Bought some for family at Christmas and they love them. Put the entire season 3 of Dexter on an 8GB memory stick and the wife watched them over the holiday weekend.

That is awesome to hear that DirecTV and TiVo are talking again. I might make the switch back to DirecTV if they had TiVo.

They have always had a partnership. It never ended, but they hadn't had TiVo create any new DVR's until this upcoming one. DirecTV was smart in that they paid a license fee to TiVo because of the patents TiVo has. That agreement helped them avoid legal issues with TiVo, and also hurt Dish Network who TiVo took to court and basically won judgement against.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/03/hell ... n-the-way/

Have you messed much with the HR2X series of DVR's? Especially more recently with all the updates DirecTV has been pumping out? While they are not as polished as TiVo they are pretty nice.

jstgtpaid wrote:That is awesome to hear that DirecTV and TiVo are talking again. I might make the switch back to DirecTV if they had TiVo.

This little badboy looks awesome (NVidia ION - Atom plus 9400M graphics card):
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/12/nvid ... 2#comments

That little box might make an awesome HD enabled MythTV frontend very soon. The MythTV user mailing list is abuzz with talk of it.

FWIW, I am on DISH and quite happy with the SD dual reciever box that they gave me. I can record off of 2 channels simultaneously, and the UI is pretty straightforward and pleasant.

The only thing that irritates me is that I can yoink the recordings off. I wonder why they wont let me do that ? **cough** MPAA bastards ** cough **

Down here so far, we have not had to have any decoder boxes for the video. I used xawtv for a long time on my old suse box to watch tv on the computer. I hate to have to go buy digital cards though, It would be interesting to try one with antenna reception though. The digital to analog boxes are a nuisance. Maybe there is a way to have linux control the box.