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Rating: 
Summary: The Weakest Link: the IR "blaster"
Review:
The Tivo's great when it works, but all too often it doesn't and clearly the weakest link is the "IR blaster".
The IR blaster is supposed to be able to change channels on your satellite or cable box, but on ours it is so inconsistent that it renders Tivo completely worthless. When it tries changing the channel to 501, for whatever reason half the time it will not register one of the digits, so it will change it to channel 51. So we've found that half the time Tivo records the wrong show or a channel that doesn't even exist - VERY ANNOYING.
The culprit is the ridiculously clumsy two-piece "IR blaster" that you arrange an inch or so away from the IR window on the satellite box. If they get lodged a bit this way or that, the channel-changing doesn't work...
anyway, it is definitely the weakest link and I'm returning it and getting a ReplayTV instead, which is cheaper anyway. And the Replay has a much more rational IR blaster, it actually sticks right on the satellite box's IR window, makes a lot more sense...
Rating: 
Summary: Beware of network adapter incompatibility with TiVo Series2
Review: If you hope to connect a TiVo Series2 DVR to your broadband internet service using the Linksys network adapter model WUSB11 (version 4) sold by Amazon & most other retailers, think again. Only versions 2.6, 2.8 & 3.0 of the Linksys adapter will work with TiVo. None of the retailers seem to be aware of the incompatibility. TiVo seems intent on disguising the incompatibility, & then blaming consumers &/or retailers...caveat emptor.
The fairly typical frustrations of an unwary purchaser were posted on Jan 10th on the TiVo user forum:
"Help me find a USB adapter!! I just purchased a new TIVO Series 2 with DVD burner from Pioneer. It's my 2nd TIVO to use wireless. My first USB Linksys WUSB11 was version 2.6 and it works great. I purchased another WUSB11, but I guess it's version 4.0 and it is not compatible. I've gone to CompUSA, Best Buy, MicroCenter and Circuit City and NONE of them carry the 2.6 version anymore. I've searched the web high and low and I can't find version numbers ANYWHERE on their web sites. The TIVO store is out of USB adapters.
Where can I get a Linksys WUSB11 Version 2.6???? (802.11b) It's driving me mad. Plus, I'm driving all over Boston trying to find this. This is insane."
Thanks!!
Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic TVing
Review: 80 hours. 80 hours that you can fill up with whatever you can possibly come up with. It's fantastic. As long as no one tells you who won, you can watch games in way less time, because you take out the commercials. If time is money, TiVo starts paying for itself right off the bat. You can set up a schedule and never miss anything you want to see again. Sometimes you get addicted to scheduling too much TV and watching it all the time, but at least you never get so bored late at night that you watch Three's Company reruns or infomercials.
Check it out in a store and get ready to want one.
Rating: 
Summary: It works, but, hidden cost ($12.95/month), noise, ...
Review: I bought a TIVO before Christmas. I spent about 2 hour with customer support (95% time was on hold). Finally, set up was done and I could enjoy advertising free TV. But, no more than two weeks, I realized TIVO has the following 5 dark sides.
1. Poor customer support, slow, poor training, and providing inconsistent information
2. Series 2 will become a "Dead Box" (I'm borrowing TIVO customer rep's word) after the trial period, if you don't want to pay $12.95 per month to subscribe TIVO services. Actually, you can get better service from Comcast for $9 per month.
3. TIVO has no stand-by feature. The hard drive and fan constantly running which makes noise and costs more energy. The noise is not very loud, but it does bother me during the quiet period in a movie. I don't know how much it will cost me for for keeping fan and hard drive running in a whole year. The Stand-by is a matured, more than 30-year-old, technology. It has been used in almost all electronic today, even in low quality cheap products. I don't understand why TIVO does not implement stand-by. Dirty quick, low quality products and poor services could be TIVO's approach.
4. If you don't have a phone jack near your TV, you'll have hard time to connect TIVO to your phone line.
5. can't record for 40 hours.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for SOME
Review: I bought this unit for my girlfriend and she's had it for about a week. Now, the first thing that comes to mind after working with this machine, is that it's really only for people who like watching a lot of tv (those loyal to a good handful of tv shows) and lead busy lives as to where they don't want to be checking in with a VCR to tape something everyday.
If you don't mind setting up your VCR and continuously buying blank video tapes, then I really wouldn't recommend this to you.
Now, I purchased the 80 hr version (and I'm glad I did) because the 40 hrs really has almost no time to record on it and the 140 hr version was too expensive. For those absolute TV junkies who've got about 4 handfuls of shows they'd like to watch, I would HIGHLY recommend the 140 hrs version.
Let's get one thing straight about the times here though. 80 hrs on this machine isn't really 80 hours UNLESS you mind a crappy looking picture. There are 4 quality settings you can set any show on: Basic, Medium, High, and Best. Basic gives you a little over 81 hours of recording time, BUT the picture comes out pretty pixelated and ugly for small objects and most people will surely mind it. The Best setting gives you about 40 hours of total recording time and it's the only setting that most closely resembles watching just regular TV (i.e. clear picture). I also had to purchase a signal amplifier ($40 from RadioShack) to hook into it because the Tivo was blocking a good signal from coming in (I don't have a cable box, just a cable wire coming in from the wall), so if you're setting it up the way I did, be prepared to spend a little more on a couple of extra wires and accessories (examples: about 2 or 3 cable leads, an RF splitter so you can watch something while taping something else, and a signal amplifier). I got a good deal from Amazon b/c i signed up for a credit card and they have the $100 rebate.
The learning curve is kinda scary when first operating the Tivo, only because the instruction booklet is so thick,but don't let it get to you, just play with the menu, it's pretty self explanatory.
Ok, so on to the good and the bad.
The Good:
-you can tape whatever you want if you live a busy life and love tv.
-You can create a season pass and let the Tivo worry about when the shows will be on and it will tape them, it will tape them all and keep them as long as there's available space (first runs, repeats, both, whatever you set it to)
-You can rewind and pause live TV (live doesn't mean Live like watching a football game, but just means actual regular television viewing, from MTV to NBC to the discovery channel to whatever)
-You can set it to any actor, director, guest, subject or movie title and Tivo will find it and wait till it's on and record it.
-The price is a lot cheaper than spending about $700 to whatever on another brand DVR recorder w/ built in DVD player.
-Tivo has a built in TV guide, so you can see what any channel is going to be playing for about the following week or two.
-if you see a good preview or commercial for an upcoming show or movie, you can press the "Thumb up" button to record it.
The Bad:
-Tivo CANNOT record 2 programs that are being played at the same time. There will be a conflict notice and you have to set a priority depending on what you'd rather watch. for this, i recommend using an RF splitter so that you can at least set your VCR to record whatever show is being conflicted. This becomes tiresome when you have shows like American Idol or The Apprentice whose times change a lot, you may miss the show cause the priority is set on another show being played at the same time.
-The times are misleading, like 80 hrs not really being good quality 80 hrs. Most people will want to only use the Best setting b/c the others have many pixles and can become distracting.
-Tivo's warrenty is pretty short, so i recommend buying from Best Buy where you can get a good deal on a warrenty cause they have a deal with Tivo. with tivo, if you send it back to them for repair, YOU are responsible for shipping costs.
-Tivo's customer service phone number has long waiting times, and they don't have direct email.
-Channel changing isn't as fast as regular tv.
-Tivo never turns off, so you'd have to set it on standby when not using it.
-you may need to buy extra accessories depending on the quality of display output.
One hint of advice, i recommend NOT getting the $300 lifetime subscription, instead get the $12.95 a month for Tivo service, because the $300 lifetime is JUST for the lifetime of your Tivo box, so if it breaks, you're out $300.
Again, this is fun to have, but if you're picky about spending lots of money and getting very good, exceptional quality customer service and tv viewing, the tivo may at times urke you. I recommend getting it at Best Buy, at least there you can go return it and not have to worry about shipping it back.
Rating:
Summary: Are you kidding? TIVO ROCKS!
Review: I have no idea why this thing warrants such complicated reviews. It is GREAT. There is always something on television that you will like, once you get Tivo. You come home, you click on what's showing and you pick from an HBO movie or a Simpsons rerun or last week's episode of your favorite sitcom. Stagger your watching of a show - join it like 20 minutes later and zoom through commercials. Watch what you want, when you want. A quick setup and you don't have to rush home to see Project Runway. It will be waiting for you. Tell Tivo you love Elizabeth Taylor - got it. It'll find Cleopatra showing at four am. I have never had mine die or reboot or anything of the nature.
Once you get it, you'll never go back to the way it was - especially since the prices keep falling. BTW, for a couple, 40 hours will be plenty of recording time for you if you intend to watch then erase. I have yet to fill ours.
Rating:
Summary: Another 5-star rating
Review: I just wanted to add another 5 star rating moreso than leave a detailed review, but here's a short version:
Of all the stuff I've bought in the last 5 years, only two really stand out as things that I've really kept and loved: my Rio Karma MP3 player and my TiVo.
I play video games. A lot. I tend to miss all the good TV shows because I don't want to quit out of the game to go watch TV and I'm way too lazy to want to mess around with a pile of VHS tapes, remembering to record the shows I want, etc.
Now I don't just watch more TV, I watch better TV. Things like science programs I wouldn't normally watch I can now easily record and check out whenever I find myself with some free time. Or just cool shows like Mythbusters -- it never would have occured to me to set it to record to VHS, but when TiVo recorded an episode for me one day it was a simple matter to tell it to "record this show every time it comes on". Now I've seen every episode of a great show I otherwise would have never seen.
It's everything you would do with a VHS recorder if only it were less hassle.
The interface is very easy to use.
Best of all, I don't even use my phone jack anymore. I hooked the TiVo into my wireless network via a standard wireless USB device. Configuring the TiVo to go wireless was frankly easier than configuring my computer to go wireless, encryption and all.
TiVo problems: zero. I've never had to reboot it or power it off or anything. I really suggest the 140-hour model too. Once you get going with this thing, it's really easy to find more shows than you have time to watch, simply because it's so very easy to record anything you think you MIGHT like to watch. The ability to scroll through the whole TV catalogue alphabetically arranged, broken up by catagory (like "sci-fi") is just brilliant.
It's not the cheapest device, especially when you factor in the service costs, but if you care enough about television to own one and have a cable or satellite hookup, then you absolutely will want to have a TiVo.
My cable company offers a similar "on-demand" service, but it only works for certain channels. Tivo obviously works on whatever is coming through the wire. It's great. Can't say enough about it.
Rating:
Summary: TiVo-great, but not for DISH Network
Review: I recently bought another TiVo since the DISH dvr I had was not anywhere near the easy, fun, near-perfect time-delay machine that TiVo is. When I returned the DISH system, I was nearly cursed; seems they know themselves what a 'work in progress' their own dvr is. But I persevered and happily attached the TiVo, which worked for all of about 2 days. Then, DISH got angry and 'back' at Tivo by placing a screen saver on the DISH network. It works this way: when the DISH network or your TV is off for any length of time, for instance waiting for TiVo to record something you've ordered, DISH blacks the screen and throws in its logo, floating around the screen. When you return home and turn it on to watch your TiVo, all you'll have is the DISH logo...for hours if your show was that long! So the lesson here is, don't think you can go home again to TiVo if you have DISH; they've figured out a way to sabatage TiVo and force you to 'rent' theirs or buy one outright. Just another example of the Enron culture at work, this time named DISH.
Rating:
Summary: Go with Comcast's dual tuner hdtv dvr
Review: If you have Comcast check their availability before buying a TiVo.
I was a very loyal TiVo customer for 2 years, then Comcast came to my city. In Massachusetts Comcast offers an Hdtv Dvr that can record two shows at once (dual tuner) and can record 20 hours of HDTV content and 40 hours of regular tv. With this TiVo you can't watch one show while recording another, but you can with Comcast's dual tuner. Getting a box like this from TiVo costs about $500.00 easy.
The major reason a lot of people like TiVo is because of their season pass feature. It is really awesome, I will give them that, however, this motorola cable box from Comcast also has a season pass like feature!(called series recordings) It works exactly like the season pass on TiVo, by recording the show by when it comes on the TV guide grid not just by time and channel. The new Comcast dual tuner DVR also has a status bar on the bottom just like TiVo so you can see where in the show you are. It has 5 ffwd and rew speeds, Tivo only has 3. It also has the 15 second replay, TiVo's is only 8. By time you reach the remote to replay something you have to hit the button twice. Also you can press record at anytime in the show and it will record from the beginning, unlike TiVo which just records from that point and erases everything before you pressed record.
Believe me this updated box from Comcast is so much better and cheaper than TiVo. It's only $9.95 a month and you don't have to buy the box. I am not a Comcast affiliate I am just a very happy customer of theirs. I still do have my TiVo box that I paid $200.00 for but it's useless because I'm not paying the $12.95 a month. (all it can do now is pause live tv)
Biggest downfall with TiVo:
Beware that with TiVo most likely you will have to use these IR probes to change the channel on your cable box. I guarantee because of these you will come home one night looking forward to watching that episode of Survivor, but it ends up being a home improvement show because the TiVo incorrectly changed the channel on the cable box. With the Comcast DVR this will never happen because its the cable box doing the recording.
Trust me I was a very happy TiVo customer until I found out there was something so much better out there.
Rating:
Summary: Great product, but customer support sucks
Review: We are a multi-tivo house, but I'm not sure if we will buy another tivo in the future. Tivo has this new Tivo ToGo feature that should be great, but the rollout of the software is taking forever (multiple months). If you call customer service they cannot even tell you when the new software version will be downloaded to your Tivo, or where you are on the list.
Tivo's software is great and I've never had any problems with their hardware, but if someone can come along with better customer service, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
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