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Why Upgrade?
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Posted by: LlamaLarry

I am sure that this will be an interesting thread. . .

I will be picking up my HDVR2 at lunchtime today and hope to have it up and running tonight, so I am not even a novice user yet.

I have been reading pretty much all the posts in these forums and just have to ask: Why do we all seem to need/want so much storage space?

I currently use my VCR for timeshifting only and as such only have like 3-4 8 hour tapes around. The rare time I actually fill a tape is when I was on vacation or I taped a mess of crap I had no intention of watching. ;-)

So were you guys all big VCR tapers or did TiVO just change your habits so much that you now watch MORE TV than before? At the moment I watch only 6 or 7 hours a week of TV (not counting DVDs/PS2/etc), about half of it on Thursdays which will really make the dual tuner deal a lifesaver.

Even if it does, do you guys save these shows? For what?

Is this a question of need or one of want?

FWIW, the whole upgrade deal appeals to my computer tweaking fetish, perhaps this is the real root of the condition. ;-)

Posted by: rsnaider

My first upgrade was simply to see if I could. My second upgrade in the very near future is just because.

My first TiVo changed the way my wife and I watch TV. We no longer care when anything is on, and we watch things when they are convient for us. Having a 6 week old baby also requires lots of extra things to watch for those late night feedings. :)

The upgraded unit can now be used to store movies that we feel we may want to watch a few extra times without fear of losing space for other recordings. Since you are going for a HDVR2 then quality is not an issue, but on the SA units with more space you can use a higher recordng quality.

I am sure most will chime in with similar stories. I do not watch 300 hours of TV, I just have a vast list of things I can watch 'now' and not have to wait for TiVo to find them.

Posted by: azitnay

I think you'll notice your drive getting more and more full if you don't upgrade :). Personally, I upgraded my first 40-hour standalone because I was recording everything at basic and not getting ANY suggestions (which means the drive was filling up on only my shows). Since I was getting no suggestions, I figured it was only a matter of time before TiVo deleted something I wanted to make room for a new recording, so I went ahead and added a 120GB. Now, I record everything at medium (so I can use MRV effectively), have around 50 suggestions, and the FSI reports that I still have about 30GB free. I've already bought another 120GB drive to supplement my bedroom TiVo (mostly my girlfriend's shows).

By no means do I watch EVERYTHING the TiVo tapes, but sometimes when you're bored it's nice to have a choice between old episodes of shows you know you like to watch, in comparison to suggestions where I often have no idea.

Saving shows is another thing a big drive will let you do, and while I don't do it much it's nice to have the option to save a 3-hour football game or 2-hour movie without worrying about your TiVo filling up its drive.

So for me, I'd say somewhat need, and mostly want. And yes, being a computer guy certainly helps in getting in the TiVo-upgrading mood.

Drew

Posted by: mdscott

Good question -- with us the additional time has permitted us to:
1) Easily save sets of shows with continuing story lines -- by FF through commercials an hour program gets cut to slightly under 50 minutes.

2) Prepare for grandchildren visits by capturing appropriate programing

3) Not to worry about letting TiVo record suggestions to its hearts content -- helped us discover Ground Force on BBC America

TiVo has changed the way we watch television -- we very rarely watch "live" programming. There is always a wide choice of programs we enjoy available at the time WE want to watch them. We can schedule or lives not NBC.

mds <getting down from soapbox>;)

Posted by: LlamaLarry

OKay, this is along the lines of what I was thinking. I was like "Holy crap, I am gonna have to watch a hell of a lot more TV!" ;-)

I know that my kids (1yo, 6yo, 11yo and 17yo) will LOVE having the TiVO as we only have one TV (Sony Wega 36XBR)...

I grew up with a TV in pretty much every room as my dad was a techno geek from way back, but I decided that I wanted to help monitor my kids' usage a little more closely. Since the grownups have veto power over anything they want to watch I imagine they will see the biggest benefit right from the start.

Even before I get to the whole space concern I am already sweating the fan/hdd noise worry. Betcha a dollar this will be the "justification" for my first upgrade. ;-)

Thanks to all that replied and to anyone else that may weigh in.

Posted by: flyersfan

Larry,

Upgrading my Tivo has allowed me to watch all the playoff hockey games I want, time-shifted of course, while still saving the other programming that will get me through the lean summer months. Between the movies, nature programming (I love big cat shows), Futurama, and all the other crap I enjoy, I'm finding that my upgrade was just barely big enough. :)

Oh, one last thing - before Tivo, I was never much of a TV person. It was too much of a bother to schedule my life around the TV Guide. Watching only what I like and when I want to watch it has completely changed my outlook.

Posted by: psxboy

My TiVo experience has been pretty much on par with the rest of the comments... I was a TV junkie before I got my TiVo, and I'm even more of one now.

I've only had mine for about three weeks and it's already completely changed my TV viewing habits. I rarely watch "live" TV now... usually I'm watching "quasi-live" TV anywhere from 1/2 hour to a couple of hours behind. On weekends it's great... there used to be nothing on during the day, but now there's ALWAYS something "on". hehe

So far, TiVo's been suggesting really cool stuff, and the larger drive gives me hours and hours of suggested programming to wade through when I'm bored. Plus, there's enough space so that I can save a bunch of episodes of my favorite shows & do my own marathons when the mood strikes me. The only thing I've had trouble reconciling is finding the time to actually WATCH all the great stuff TiVo is recording for me. (I figure if I quit my job, that'll give me a lot more time to watch TV.. hehe)

Besides that, the guide is great too. I was impressed with the guide that came with our Digital Cable service, but TiVo blows that out of the water. With the ability to sort the lineup pretty much any way you want, it's made my "planning what I want to watch" process much easier. And discovering new things I didn't even know were on is another pleasing side-effect.

One of the biggest changes since I became a TiVo-convert though... my exposure to commercials has dropped dramatically. I sort of have mixed feelings about this side-effect though... on one hand, I hate commercials (who doesn't?) and the fact I can skip right by them is great, but if the TiVo market ever gets saturated to the point where less people are watching commercials than aren't, either the TV stations will start dropping like flies or we'll start seeing more & more commercials being delivered via other mediums. (Or TiVo, Inc. will become co-opted by the evil corporate conglomerates & get screwed up to the point where no one wants it anymore... in typical big-corporation fashion.) ::dread::

Anyway, enough ranting. Just needed an outlet for all my TiVo-induced joy. :) Now if I could only find WoRko or LiFeo...

Posted by: allan

I haven't upgraded yet, but Tivo HAS changed my TV viewing. For one thing, I've discovered a lot of good shows that air at night, or when I'm at work. Now I can watch those show when there's nothing else on, or in place of a mediocre show that I would have watched just because there was nothing better on. I certainly don't watch everything Tivo records, even on a puny 60 hour unit, but I have much more choice of what to watch than I did with 8 hour video tapes.

Posted by: nellee

Since we just had a kid, will be 1 year old this month, I am not obligated to share space on my DirecTivo with Elmo and Big Bird :p

But having extra space allows you to think, "hey I may want to watch this later while I'm watching my primary show, hit record"

Lets you record anything and everything and get back to it anytime later without much fear of it getting deleted by end of the week.

I still have my first show recorded 2 1/2 months ago, Swordfish, the day my Directv system was installed :D

With all the hard drive deals out there now, it's well worth it.:up:

Posted by: bevinst

quote:
Originally posted by LlamaLarry
I have been reading pretty much all the posts in these forums and just have to ask: Why do we all seem to need/want so much storage space?

Business trips and/or Vacations. You come back and all the shows you normally watch are sitting on the HD.

I used to time shift via VCR, and TiVo makes it so much easier you tend to record more shows. On any given day, I will record a couple of news shows, some primetime network shows, "The Screensavers" on TechTV, and possibly a movie on one of the premium channels. Granted, I end up skipping a lot of the uninteresting segments of the shows.

Recording things and "best" quality, on a stand alone TiVo, eats up a lot disk space. You don't have to worry about this.

Catching up with M*A*S*H repeats on FX... where they show about 4 episodes a day.

Saving daily episodes of a show until the weekend.

Dubbing rentals to the TiVo (SA only) and returning the tapes/dvds on time.

--
Tommy
SVR2000 upgraded to 75 hours
Series 2 upgraded to 142 hours.

Posted by: Imageek2

I too thought that 35 hours of recording time (really around 27 hours) was going to be plenty, but I soon tired of worrying that something was going to be deleted before I had a chance to see it. Just after I upgraded the miniseries "Taken" was on SciFi. 20 hours long and I didn't have to think twice about recording it. It was worth it.

Posted by: Answers

I did my first successful upgrade a couple of years ago. Added two 80 gig drives to an 30 hour Phillips Tivo for a gain of about 200 hours of basic and 55 hours of 'Best' recording time. At the time I did it in part as a means of getting the maximum bang for the buck. High hour Tivos were much more expensive and low hour Tivos could be had for about $150. 80 gig drives cost about two hundred bucks a hit back then so an upgrade like the one I attempted was not cheap. However, in the end what I had was a unit that cost about as much as a high end Tivo but had over three times the recording capacity of the best units on the market.

Bottom line for me at that time was the fun I got from playing with the new gadget and the pride I took in a successful upgrade. I was the American beta tester for TivoMad and among the very first end users to successfully upgrade a single drive Tivo to a (then) monster two drive unit. All this at a time when I wasn't even watching that much TV!

What I wanted from my upgraded Tivo was a machine that would rid me of all the annoyances associated with a VCR. Too many steps to set up a recording - too many steps to find a tape I wanted to watch when I wanted to watch it - too many tapes cluttering up my limited storage space. I viewed the upgraded Tivo as a self-contained storage library offering ease of use and ease of access.

What I got was a machine that changed the way we watched TV. I now consider my Tivo to be as indispensible as my microwave oven (more). I really can't imagine going back to watching TV without one.

I must admit that until the recent advent of version 4 software my dreams of an orderly storage library were unfulfilled. With a huge recording capacity I eventually ended up with an extremely long and ungainly list of programs. It was a pain in the butt to pan up and down that list every time I wanted to see something that had been saved a few weeks or months before. As a result, I often found myself deleting old programs for no other reason than to keep the list manageable. The recent advent of the 'folder' utility has greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the massive recording capacity of my recently upgraded new Series 2 unit (274 hours of basic - and about 75 hours of best) A major benefit of such an upgrade is that I have the luxury of recording everything at Best .

Last but not least, because the cost of hard drive storage has continued to fall in the past couple of years while the storage size has increased the cost of upgrading a Tivo has dropped substantially. Brand new 120 gig hard drives can now be had for under a hundred bucks. While mass upgrade capacity once cost over four hundred dollars and was limited to a total of 160 gigs - you can now do a monster upgrade for under two hundred.

In the final analysis, in my opinion, the best reason for upgrading your Tivo is still the challenge and the satisfaction that you get when the job has been successfully completed and you have bent your store bought Tivo to your will. That's a feeling of accomplishment that's very hard to beat.

Answers

Ps. Regarding one of the ways I use my Tivo: I love not having to watch commercials. I use the thirty minute buffer for live TV as often as possible. If I want to watch something live I will switch to that channel and then switch to a recording or use the I/O button on my MX- 500 remote to switch to direct TV for as long as it take for the buffer to nearly fill - then I'll switch to the live TV show and use the buffer as a means to avoid watching the commercials. I would dearly love to see Tivo come up with a means of retaining the thirty minute buffer on the channel of my choice while I surfed around to see what else was on.

Posted by: Marco

LL,
First, welcome to the TiVolution! It looks like nobody bothered to say it yet. :)
Second, come back to this thread after a month of having TiVo in your house. I predict your palm will contact your forehead within a couple of seconds, i.e. "What was I *thinking*?"

If you record TV in any quantity, and especially if you have a family full of others who watch different programs, you are very likely to fill up your hard drive pretty quick, and you will find that programs you had some desire to watch are being deleted to make room for new recordings. Or you will take advantage of TiVo's capabilities, and record interesting stuff you never would have bothered with before.

Enjoy your TiVo, and happy upgrading!

Posted by: tgr131

I upgraded so I could record at "best" quality. Also, I wanted to be able to grab the occasional movie, and with only 9 ? hours of storage at best quality, I didn't get to watch many movies. Now I've got roughly 27 hours at best -- enough to grab my shows, AND have the occasionally movie on hand.

David

Posted by: Skippy18

We upgraded recently and added a 120GB drive to our 60 hour standalone unit. I am so glad we upgraded. Now we can actually save stuff on there for later and not have to worry about running out of space. Recording everything in Basic gives us 226 hours of TV.
Right now we have the entire second season of 24, several Farscape episodes (airs every night) which we haven't had time to watch, most of season 5 and 6 of Stargate. We're still missing some of those episodes and now we'll have enough space to record Season 7. We'll definitely have enough shows to watch this summer.

As far as the VCR goes, I only taped Friends and the X-Files when I knew I wouldn't be home to watch it. It was too much of a pain to record the other stuff. I like that now I can watch TV on my own schedule.

Posted by: thecharacterguy

quote:
Originally posted by flyersfan
Larry,

Upgrading my Tivo has allowed me to watch all the playoff hockey games I want, time-shifted of course, while still saving the other programming that will get me through the lean summer months. Between the movies, nature programming (I love big cat shows), Futurama, and all the other crap I enjoy, I'm finding that my upgrade was just barely big enough. :)

Oh, one last thing - before Tivo, I was never much of a TV person. It was too much of a bother to schedule my life around the TV Guide. Watching only what I like and when I want to watch it has completely changed my outlook.

You don't need anything more than a 14 hour to record Flyer playoff series!! You guys can't get outta the 1st round!

ROTFL!!!!

Posted by: BlankMan

quote:
Originally posted by thecharacterguy
You don't need anything more than a 14 hour to record Flyer playoff series!! You guys can't get outta the 1st round!

ROTFL!!!!

LOL Good one!

But on topic, given time, Larry will be able to answer his question himself. I lasted 4 days with my first T60 before I ran to Best Buy and installed a pair of 80G drives. It was quickly apparent to me that 35 hours was not going to be enough.

It's not that I watch a lot of TV, it's that I have very diverse interests, so I record many different types of shows, some I may never watch before they are deleted to free up space but this is the point:

When I do have some free time to watch TV I can pick a show I'm interested in at the moment from all the different types. I'm typically not a creature of habit, I do not watch any series so I don't have to worry about missing an episode.

Posted by: phone1

Because the whole point of TiVo is to record what you want and watch it when you want. Having to worry about programs being deleted just seems counter to whole concept.

Posted by: legalaliens

Movies. We can (and do) save quite a few movies that we like and I don't have to delete them. The movies are always at our fingertips when we want them. No need to pop in a VHS tape or DVD.

We currently have about fifteen movies on the HDVR2 that are set to "not delete". We also have about twelve season passes set up to record (and save up to five episodes) kids programs as well as prime time shows and sports (I like soccer).

35 Hours is just not enough to do all this.

Posted by: bsnelson

Another hockey fan here. We have upgraded boxes to store lots of games, and we have six boxes so we can record up to twelve games at one time, meaning we can get all of them 99% of the time.

I think this also means that we're obsessed (my wife and I)

Brad

Posted by: flyersfan

quote:
Originally posted by thecharacterguy
You don't need anything more than a 14 hour to record Flyer playoff series!! You guys can't get outta the 1st round!

ROTFL!!!!

Not true! They got all the way to 6 games in the second round! :D

While I'm a Flyers fan first, I'm a hockey fan second. I've watched almost all the games this playoff year... mostly time-shifted. (To stay mildly on-topic), my upgraded Tivo is dutifully saving all my other programming until the season is over. If I still had just a 60-hr unit, more than 1/2 of the stuff I have saved would be gone.