Hopeless Geek

I’ve been without DirecTV and TiVo for about a month now and I figured now’s a good time to look back on it and see if this was a good decision. The best way I’ve found of determining that is the venerable pro/con list. So without further blathering, I’ll just drop into that.

Pros

1. Recording four shows at once without degradation in video quality. A DirecTiVo can do this for two shows at once but I, alas, have one of the old 40GB Series 2 TiVos that was controlling the DirecTV box via IR cable. So not only was I getting compressed video off DTV, but then TiVo was compressing it again. Best Quality never was. With U-Verse, however, what I see in a recorded show is always the raw MPEG-4 stream that it received, so that’s spectacular. Then on top of the better video quality, I get four at once.
2. Better conflict handling. Rather than TiVo’s priority-based approach, the U-Verse box walks me through conflict resolution when it happens and lets me sacrifice a recording right there in the “please record this” screen. TiVo makes me add the show as all-or-nothing and then tweak it in the Season Pass screen (for which processing takes forever when you change something).

Several years ago I had television service through Grande in Austin and was overall very happy with their digital TV service. It had some downsides (the STB, for one — I wasn’t used to that) but was overall a great experience.

Some time later I got a TiVo off eBay and how I used TV changed forever. I loved the gadget and what it enabled me to do (that is, almost never miss a show). I got the 40GB model but after some time I got the upgrade kit from weaknees.com and crammed an 80GB in alongside the original. I’ve been running that same 110-hour TiVo ever since.

With Grande I could use the serial cable with the Motorola box they used, and that was really great. It wasn’t hard to setup and made it reasonably possible to change channels quick enough to browse (though, not really). However, I had to move to a new apartment and Grande did not service that apartment, Time-Warner did. They wanted over $200 on the first bill (install, sign-up, first month, last month, something else..). I said that DirecTV didn’t want any of that and would do the install for free. After talking to various people the unsaid answer was: “Well, then do it.”

So I did.