TiVo TCD652160 HD Digital Video Recorder

What is there to say? If you love TiVo, you will LOVE TiVo HD. My parents had TiVo and switched to a DVR without the TiVo service when they moved...it is so hard to use, it is not user friendly. TiVo is just intuitive. You can turn it on and figure it out without instructions.

We've been TIVO customers with Series 2 DVRs for a few years. We also had Charter cable box DVRs. The features of TIVO are way better than the charter boxes. In particular the swivel search, season passes, extra time on live events, and transferring recordings between DVRs.

We switch to Series 3 DVRs and got rid of our cable boxes. The Series 3 takes cable cards so we get all of our digital/HD content from the cable company through only the TIVO with cable cards installed. The installation was a pain (3 visits). This was entirely ignorance on the part of the Charter technicians, the TIVO instructions and setup was excellent. When a technician who knew what he was doing finally showed up with all the right cards installation was very smooth.

A few surprises:

- content coming in on Cable Digital channels can not be copied between Tivos.

We have about 100 channels that are part of the basic package, and then about 100 that are "digital" and encrypted in a separate package. When these are recorded the Tivo says something like "Copyright owner prohibits copying this material" and it must be watched on the original TIVO. I'm hoping that when we go all digital next year this doesn't happen to all channels...

- Amazon UnBox has been disappointing, long downloads, poor selection.

We gave up "On-Demand" from Charter when we got the Tivos because cable cards don't support it. We figured "OK, we'll just use use Amazon UnBox. It is a big company and probably has a great selection.

A movie takes about as long to download as it takes to watch (typically about 2 hours). This is really unacceptable. you sit down to decide to watch a movie and want to just stream and watch, not sit around and wait for a download. you can start watching immediately, but end up having to wait for content to download during watching if viewing speed exceeds download speed. (FYI, I have the TIVO on a 100Mb wired-LAN and have a 10Mb download capacity through my cable model, this is NOT an internal network issue at my house as Tivo has tried to claim)

We've been disappointed at the video selection as well. It took us 4 tries to name a movie they had that we want to watch.

All-in-all an excellent DVR for watching/recording TV, movies, sports, but the Amazon stuff is bogus.

I just purchased a samsung 46 inch hdtv and purchased a $99 tivo on promotion but my billing shows $254.

I found out about a TIVO several years ago. I was hesitant to get one because VCRs were so difficult to set the recordings on. TIVO has made it so simple to do. I don't miss anything I want to see on television anymore.

I've been using this for only 3 weeks so can't say much about long-term reliability. But functionally, I've been extremely happy with the unit. The FF function works like reviews I'd read - it automatically rewinds a little when you stop FF. With a little practice, it puts you right where you want to resume play. The box is in general reliable, much more so than my earlier Comcast box. I haven't seen any freezes and reboots that I've read about. One problem I've had though is the "HDMI Not Permitted" issue. Every now and then, the CP handshake with my TV fails and I just get this verbiage plastered on the screen. When it does this, you have to switch from HDMI to Component. Of course I don't want to do that. After a little googling I found that others who have had the same problem fixed it by unplugging (not turning off) and plugging the TV back in. This resets the HDMI CP handshake. That technique worked for me. I've had it happend three times so far. It's annoying but not as bad as some of the stuff I had to endure with the Comcast box.

I also like the Tivo Desktop software. It's nice to be able to archive recordings from the Tivo to your PC via your home network. The software isn't great but it does the job, and it's free.