(Yeah, yeah, I could probably post this on the TiVo forum, but the advice over here always seems to be of the highest quality...)

So I got my DirecTV/TiVo box installed yesterday afternoon and everything seems to be working great. By forcing it to dial in several times, I've been able to get it mostly up to date -- I've now got version 2.5 of the software to take advantage of my dual tuners and such, and it seems to have mostly downloaded all the schedule information.

Random questions:

- There are still some holes in my schedule, particularly for the local channels. It will say "to be announced". As it dials in again and again, will all this junk be filled in?

- I've been able to figure out how to ask TiVo WishLists to follow professional basketball teams (searching for the team name in the title), but I can't figure out how to follow college teams the same way. All the titles seem to be something unhelpful like "College Basketball", and a keyword search on the team that I want ("California", i.e., "UC Berkeley") is coming up blank. Any ideas?

- Do I want to go to the trouble of using any of the TiVo backdoors? The only thing that really screams at me is the 30-second skip feature. Is it noticably more useful for skipping commercials than the usual fast-forward mechanism?

- Is there some way to internally disable Macrovision, or would I need an external box?

- I was planning to stick with the one built-in hard drive rather than dropping in a second one to increase my capacity, mostly on the theory that there will be some outrageously better thing available by the end of the year so my current TiVo head unit wasn't worth throwing a lot of money into. Do you agree? Disagree? Would my quality of life change significantly if I had a second hard drive now?

1 - All the guide data is from the satellite data stream. It can take up to 3 or 4 days to populate totally.

2 - Ive had no luck with college stuff either. Strangely enough my ReplayTV was much easier to set up in that aspect.

3 - The 30 second skip is all I use. However, you can tune the fast forward skip "correction" to be more in tune with your habits. If you notice, when you come back from the 3x fast forward, the Tivo backs up somewhat to try to compensate for you overshooting. That's adjustable.

4 - No idea on the Macrovision.

5 - Depends on your viewing habits. I pulled my original 40GB drive and replaced it with a 120GB unit and ended up with 109 hours. Between that and my 80 hour Replay, I can pretty much record all the stuff I want to. More space is better if you record a lot because you can save things up for longer periods of time. Hell, you can even get full seasons of shows using the "Dont record repeats" option.

I don't believe there is any copy protection such as macrovision on the DirecTiVo. This would make the "Save to VCR" feature useless.

By the way, if you have a non-Sony DirecTiVo, Save to VCR is not automatic so it may already be useless to you.

What do you mean by ``not automatic''? I know I liked it better when there was a countdown. Any ideas why they got rid of that?

I have a sony DirecTiVo that can automatically turn on and start recording on sony VCRs using the included IR blasters. When the program is over, it will automatically hit stop and turn off the power.

The Philips and Hughes DirecTivos include the blasters, but doesn't support automatic recording on any brand VCR.

Oh. I see. I always edit out the commercials when recording to tape, anyway, so that feature's not useful to me. The only time I ever use ``Save to VCR'' is when the beginning of a program is right at the beginning of the recording and I have no other way to prevent the status bar from showing up.

Hmmm... automatic save-to-VCR is cool, but I don't own a Sony VCR, so it wouldn't have made a difference to me. My Panasonic VCR does automatic commercial zapping and can be easily convinced to record for exactly an hour than stop (it takes about three button presses to do it), so it's not like it's a big deal either way.

The cheapest DirecTiVo boxes are the Hughes and Phillips, with the Sony costing a good bit more. I got the Hughes box, mostly because of some grumbling about the Phillips I found on the TivoCommunity boards. Apparently, many Phillips DirecTiVos come, out of the box, with a broken remote control, and also have two hard drives already inside them, making upgrades a pain; the Hughes boxes have none of these problems.

Having a Macrovision-disabling switch would let you back up movies, not just normal TV shows. If the DirecTiVo is like a normal DirecTV receiver, then it has a Macrovision chip inside that is turned on or off based on whether the show requests it.

Anyway, one day later, and everything seems to be working great. I had to go through and manually set up the "channels I receive" to remove all the pay sports channels, non-local local channels, etc., and now everything seems to be working properly. Heaven only knows why the system can't figure out that I haven't paid for whatever channels and remove them from the "channels I receive."

Big summary: DirecTiVo rocks, and it rocks seriously harder than what you can get from Time Warner Cable of Houston. Yeah, you can get lots more HDTV from Time Warner (they carry HDTV for all the local channels), but until there's an HDTV TiVo box, I'm happy where I am.

The cheapest DirecTiVo boxes are the Hughes and Phillips, with the Sony costing a good bit more. I got the Hughes box, mostly because of some grumbling about the Phillips I found on the TivoCommunity boards. Apparently, many Phillips DirecTiVos come, out of the box, with a broken remote control, and also have two hard drives already inside them, making upgrades a pain; the Hughes boxes have none of these problems.

Having a Macrovision-disabling switch would let you back up movies, not just normal TV shows. If the DirecTiVo is like a normal DirecTV receiver, then it has a Macrovision chip inside that is turned on or off based on whether the show requests it.

I've never had a problem backing up movies off HBO and such. I've never even heard of this issue with DirecTV equipment. If it is true, DirecTiVo is by far the most hackable DirecTV receiver so someone will hack it.

On the Philips vs Hughes issue. I have a Philips with a defective remote. The remote is slow, but not so bad that I feel I have to get it replaced. Also, the Philips can come with either one or two drives (I haven't opened mine). Either way you get two power leads. On the Hughes box you only get one since it will only come with one drive. You would have to buy a Y adapter to add another drive (no biggie).

Just got a notice in the mail that Tivo is jacking up monthly rates to 12.95 a month. yuck

...30-second skip feature. Is it noticably more useful for skipping commercials than the usual fast-forward mechanism?

Depends on whether you prefer to press the "adv" button eight times to skip a four minute commercial break, or prefer to press the FF button three times (to get to 60x speed) and then the play button once. I'm more comfortable with the latter for several reasons: I get to see little vignettes of the commercials, and every once in a while there is one that I actually do want to watch. Sometimes the commercial breaks are not in 30 second increments -- a :10 station break or network promo can get you out of synch. Finally, understand that the :30 advance hack disables your advance button for jumping to the end of a program with a single button press and back to the beginning with a second.

tanstaafl.

And don't forget the newer feature where you can jump to the white hash marks by pressing the same button. It disables that, too.

Macrovision will be on the analog output, so it won't affect your stream-saving to the hard disks. Macrovision information is present somewhere in the vertical blank (non-visible) area of the signal, so if your Tivo is compliant, it should record all that goodness as well. This will affect performance when going out to tape however. There are external devices to get around this. You can probably use some type of timebase correction as well.

I just want to know if anyone has any DivX hacks? You know, encode select material to DivX before even spitting it back to your computer. Do any of the ethernet hacks allow pulling recorded material to your computer? Or are we looking at disconnecting the drives? Not that I plan to distribute recorded material of course. I don't even have broadband (nor the inclination). However, some quality (further) lossy compression would be cool for archiving a few select programs. I don't do video tape anymore.

Now, the important question (for me) is... Where can I get a nice (very nice) price on a stand-alone Tivo? Without having to pre-sign any kind of programming agreement (I'm in Canada, eh...) Any pointers to FAQs would be nice (I don't want to subscribe to the Tivo forum and read for ages if I don't have to )

Bruno