Add high-quality entertainment to your home theater without adding clutter. Receive your premium digital cable channels in their full native HD format with CableCARD decoders (available from your cable provider). The TiVo Series3 HD Digital Media Recorder is also compatible with analog cable and over-the-air digital HD (ATSC). Provides an all-digital connection to your high-end display: HDMI for video, SP/DIF for audio.
It’s not home theater without THX®-certification. The TiVo Series3 HD box maintains all of the sharpness and detail found in the original broadcast-both in sound and picture-so you get the complete high-definition experience as it was intended. Record up to 300 hours of standard recording time or up to 32 in High Definition with this THX-certified digital video recorder that delivers high-quality, high-definition programming and allows you to record up to 2 live shows at once. Schedule recordings anywhere from tivo.com and the advanced TiVo broadband features, including digital photos, Internet radio, podcasts. The backlit programmable remote control is easy to configure to your TV.
- CableCARD technology to access your HD digital cable channels
- Supports digital cable, analog cable, and ATSC terrestrial over-the-air digital
- Full 1080i output over component or HDMI
- Extremely quiet box
Product details:
- The world’s first THX-certified DVR, delivers the highest-quality home theater AV experience
- 300 hour recording capacity, twice as much as most cable alternatives; 25-35 hours of HD
- Easily connect to your home network with built-in Ethernet and USB ports
- Record 2 live digital cable channels at once, while watching a pre-recorded show
TiVo service subscription required
Customer feedback:
1. When we purchased an HDTV earlier this year, we resigned ourselves to using the DVR provided by Comcast, our cable company. We knew we needed DVR functionality, and we weren’t content to watch only standard definition TV on our new set. So we bit the bullet and replaced our TiVo Series 2 with the Comcast-supplied DVR. I’m not going to review the Comcast DVR in depth here, but it’s safe to say that I’m overjoyed to be able to go back to a TiVo device for our main TV.
I’ve been using the TiVo Series 3 for only about three days, so these are initial impressions. Overall, it’s a huge improvement over the cable company DVR. It has the same awesome TiVo interface we knew and loved from our previous TiVos, but it’s been spruced up a bit for HD. It looks nice. The picture quality is excellent, and the TiVo Series 3 has a great variety of options for what video modes it sends to the TV.
I had absolutely no trouble getting the two Cable Cards working. I plugged them both in to the box at the appropriate point in Guided Setup, called Comcast to have them activated, and then finished Guided Setup. They’ve worked perfectly from the beginning, tuning both SD and HD channels, both premium and non-premium.
2. TiVo did a spectacular job with the hardware. The recorder can hold ~35 hours of HDTV or ~300 hours of non-HD programming, which is significantly more than cable company-provided DVRs. The Series3 can record two shows at once — either OTA (connect an antenna to receive the networks) or cable via CableCards, and if you have a recent HDTV, the TiVo can output all the recording via HDMI (a pure digital connection between the TiVo and your HDTV). It also contains a host of less major upgrades (back lit remote, an OLED display, etc) that improve upon the famous TiVo experience.
I should point out that, at the time of writing, the Series3 is missing functionality that is available on older TiVos, such as ability to export shows to your PC, iPod, etc (TivoToGo), and the ability to view shows recorded on the Series3 on other TiVos in your house (Multi-room viewing). If these are important to you, you may want to delay your purchase until this functionality is added (currently, there is no guarantee they will be available). I rated the item as “4 stars” because of the missing functionality.