I forgot to mention that the rebate ends on Oct. 4th.
In short, you pay a flat $5 fee to DirecTV for the addition of TIVO service (compared to $12 for a standalone "non-DirecTV" TIVO). Better yet, you can have upto 8 TIVO's in your house for that $5 fee!
Granted, each reciever you add requires a $5 "mirroring" fee, but that is the same for non-Tivo boxes...
I don't feel I'm explaining this clearly, so here is an example:
My main entertainment room has DirecTV for which I pay $29 a month. To enable the TIVO, I pay an additional $5.
I added another DirecTV box with builtin TIVO to my bedroom. For $5, I get all of the programing that my main room gets, including the TIVO services.
I could keep adding DirecTIVO's to my house for $5 each.
One thing about these that makes them better than standalone TIVO's is that they record the MPEG2 stream straight from your dish - there is no additional compression. The quality is much better because of this and the boxes are cheaper to produce because they don't require an mpeg encoder.
Another thing that makes DirecTIVO's better than standalone Tivo's is that you can record 2 programs at once while watching a 3rd program that was recorded previously! It has two dish inputs and can use both of them at the same time. I can't believe the drive is fast enough to record 2 shows and playback a 3rd from memory, but it works!
HACKING:
I've added a 120GB drive to my brother-in-law's DirecTIVO box. He is running a hacked card on it and a "free tivo service" hack as well. The hacked card is stupid though because it goes out every week. Mine is "stock" now because buying another box for $50 was cheaper than adding a drive and I don't feel like going to jail for stealing satellite.
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Brad B.