In reply to:


I would also love to see a Tivo w/dual tuners and possibly even HDTV support, but the latter hasn't been in their plans AFAICT



One major problem for Tivo [and others] is that implementing two Tuner support for analogue TV requires two of the expensive Sony MPEG2 encoding chipsets plus supporting stuff, like memory and the like.

For DirectTivos, they record the video stream which is already converted into a MPEG-like stream, so all they have to do in this case is implement dual satellite tuners - relatively cheap, then select which of the many "streams" to record to disk "as-is".
For Playback, they only need one "playback" chip - as you can only watch one channel at a time, even if you record two shows at once.
[not sure but can a DirectTivo record two channels, while you watch a recorded earlier program? - like the TW PVR does?]

The TimeWarner is a Digital cable only PVR, which means its like the Directtivo in that it gets already encoded MPEG2 video streams, so merely records them to hard disk.

re: HDTV support, that gets even trickier as you have so much more data to shuffle around inside the box, even once its converted to MPEG format.
This normally requires more CPU and faster disks - which is one reason Tivo moved to the new Series boxes (apart from being cheaper to make no doubt also), as they have more CPU available.
Not that the Tiveo needs much CPU as most of the processing thats CPU intensive uses the dedicated encoding an decoding chips for that - being able to play mp3 requires CPU though and thats probably why they did what they did for the series 2 hardware.

now what would be nice is the ability to "watch" two programs at once (either playback 2 shows from disk, or mix and match 1 or 2 live shows with recorded content) - you'd need to do this either: using the PIP feature, or side by side in "wide-screen mode" on your widescreen TV - you could do some really cool stuff this way...

...Now thats what I call PowerViewing...