TiVo HD XL - You’re ultimate HD cable experience. Discover a whole new universe of entertainment - in crystal-clear THX sound and picture-optimized for digital cable. It’s all the digital entertainment you want, whenever you want it! With the Emmy Award-Winning TiVo service, plus movies, music, and videos from the internet, TiVo HD XL makes the most of broadcast and broadband.
Technical Details
- More recording space, up to 150 hours of HD shows
- THX Certified for exceptional sound and video quality
- Pause live TV, plus rewind, slo-mo, and instant replay any channel, any time
- 1 Box. All Entertainment.
- Download your favorite movies and TV shows from the web, stream music, watch YouTube on TiVo, and more!
Customer feedback:
a. First off this is the fourth DVR I’ve used (fifth if you count the Tivo Series 2 I bought my parents years ago). My first was a 160-hour ReplayTV (no longer available), and I loved it. As you’d guess when you have 160 hours to play with you have a lot of options. I was first afraid I’d become a TV addict, recording and watching far more TV than I ever did before - and in the first month or so that was basically true. Over time, however, you find your habits change - I eventually grew tired of recording every show ever broadcast, and instead used the capacity to only record my favorite shows, but with multiple episodes. That is, if you have a ton of room you don’t have to watch ‘ER’ every Thursday at 10 - you can read a book instead until you’re tired, then just hit the sack. Only when you’re in the mood will you fire the DVR up, and you’ll find multiple episodes of your favorite shows to watch. I actually found I was watching less TV, or at least TV on fewer evenings, with the large capacity DVR - I’d broken the habit of sitting down in front of the boob tube at 8 to be fed by the networks (and waiting through their commercials).
Well when the HDTV switch came around and I started using the DVR from my cable company and it’s 15 hours of High Def capacity, I went from DVR bliss to recording-management he$$. I could not record much at all, and so instead I seemed to spend all my time massaging my recordings (recording repeats at a later time to free up space now) or, what was worse, finding myself trapped between watching a show when I wasn’t in the mood or finding it gone the next day. Also, obviously, I couldn’t record near as much a variety as before.
b. 1. Tons of memory. Since I’m only recording SD programming (for now) just to give you an idea, I can record 500+ hours of high quality SD video as compared with the series 2 that held about 20.
2. HD 1080i/surround sound capability. The feature is there when I need it, I can hook it up to over the air antenna for local HD broadcasting if I so desired (just got it so I haven’t set that up yet)
3. Dual channel recording. This was the major limiting feature of the series 2, only one channel before and it was whichever channel the TiVo was set to at the time. Now you have two, and if you hook it up right you can watch 3 programs simultaneously (2 on TiVo, one ‘live’ through TV)
4. The cable card feature that allows your TiVo to act as a cable box for your cable company (provided you actually have a cable company who has the cable cards). I talked with the people at TiVo and they said EVERY cable company is bound by an agreement to support TiVo, however I couldn’t get either of my cable companies to admit that or even acknowledge whether they had cable cards I could use.
5. Everything else that makes TiVo wonderful is also here.
To me this was worth every penny. If you have a cable provider who’s not willing to jack you around and actually let you use the cable card feature for your HD programming, don’t let anyone talk you into those “better than TiVo” DVRs. You’ll miss out on the, “I wonder what my TiVo recorded for me today…” and the “bloop bloop” …commercial skipping.. “bloop” with the perfect auto-backup that takes human reaction time into account.