3) It comes with 50' of telephone line, and only calls out once or twice a week. You can even make it call out on demand, so you can plug in the line, make the call, then coil the line back up.



By default, it will try to dial every night. HOWEVER.....


MAJOR OFF TOPIC, but really cool...

Since it is running Linux, you can hack about a change for this. All at a very much voiding your warranty cost, but HEY... On the front edge of the tivo motherboard is a diagnostic connector. It's in effect a reversed pci/isa connector. Tridge of Samba fame reverse engineered this connector, and published the plans that allow you to hook up a network card to the box.

Now..... You don't need a phone line, just a Cat-5 jack (which seem to be in much greater abundance around my place than the phone lines). Hack the software for the dialout a very little bit (basically killing the modem script) and then the TiVo will connect to the main servers via your existing network connection (ala Cable/ DSL/ ISDN)

Make the downloads much quicker, don't have to worry about tying up the phone line... HAVING a phone line. (I'm Cellular only now.. aside from my broadband connections) Plus, it allows you to Telnet to a Bash prompt on your VCR.

How cool is that?