TiVo Community Forums Archives - Is it Necessary ?????

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Is it Necessary ?????
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Posted by: Cruiseraz

I am just curious to the fact of why folks like to upgrade their hard drives in the receivers.
I mean exactly just how many shows can you possibly watch ?

Can't you just record what it is that you like and then watch them and after watching them just delete them to free up the space ?

Not knocking this at all, it is just I can't understand what putting a larger sized hard drive in is going to really do for you. If you fill up your large hard drive you are simply just going to delete the programs that you have watched in order to free up that space.

Is there something to this or is it just like Tim Allen on Home Improvement "rah rah rah,,,, more power" ? :p

Posted by: zutmin

Something tells me you spend less time watching TV than most of the folks around here :)

Posted by: OasisRed

I personally like to have a few shows that are always available to me marked SUID. That way if I'm in a Maltese Falcon or Joe Versus the Volcano mood, I can watch it. And, I don't have to put in a tape or load a DVD. Also, the quality is much better than if I record it to tape to have 'forever'. When DVD recorders get cheaper, I'll record to them. But I'll probably still have some of my favorites on my TiVo so that I don't have to get up. Sloth is high on my list of attributes!:D

Posted by: JD9900

In my case, an upgraded Tivo unit is practically a must have if I want more than about a week's retention on my shows. This is because I have 5 people recording and watching TV. Including 2 kids and a grandmother. As you can imagine, our viewing tastes very quite a bit. I'm a big Sports and Dramas guy (avg. show length - 2 hours). My wife is into the music scene - VH1, MTV2, etc. (avg. show length - 1.2 hours). My mom is the CBS drama type (avg. show length - 1 hour). And my kids are all about the cartoons (avg. show length - 30 minutes). In a given day, we will all record at least one show, the kids at least 2 shows. That brings us up to, at least, 5 hrs 15 mins of TV recording a day. And trust me, this is a rock bottom number for my house. :)

So, given that number, we start losing programs about 6 days after they've been recorded, in a best case scenario. Friday and Saturday nights are the nights I generally use to catch up on my TV, then I let them pile up again during the week. With a standard HD, I am almost daily having to go in and nuke kids shows and some of my wife's older stuff to make sure my stuff will retain on Tivo until the weekend. And God forbd I actually want to record a movie that is Dolby Digital - even more HD space needed. :)

When we first got the Tivo, we were fine, but we've reached the point now where we just can't watch all our shows when we want to because they'll be deleted before that. As soon as I can afford it, I'm throwing in a couple of 160G drives and totally maxing out my storage space. This way I know I'll be fine. :)

Posted by: roderashe

Here's my take (even though I haven't upgraded my hard drive - yet):

I would love to have more space to keep things for, perhaps, months at a time. Occaisionally, we may order a pay-per-view for the kids like 'rugrats in paris' and they love to watch it over and over. Yeah, we're too lazy to d-load to vhs, which we almost never use anymore anyway. Or my wife may have a 'hard-to-find' movie that doesn't come on tv too often and it would be nice just to have it 'there' even though you woulnd't access it much.

It's the same as my computer's hard drive. I have files that I may never open again but with all the space I have, I can access it any time (yes, I do backup, too, but if I have plenty off hd space, I have instant access to that file...)

bret:)

Posted by: Trent Bates

I just added an 80 GB drive to my DTivo because I had always been getting close to running out of space.

There were two big marathons on last weekend that really pushed the limits of my factory DTivo 35 hour drive.

On Friday the 28th, Sci-Fi showed 9 episodes of "American Gothic" which is a show that both my Wife and I have seen just enough of to wonder what the heck is going on. These appeared to have been the first 9 episodes of the series so now we know how it all started. (I think)

Then as we were trying to get all of "American Gothic" watched, I read about the "Alias" marathon coming up. We recorded all of those too AFTER finishing the "American Gothic" marathon and we have been racing against the clock to watch "Alias" before all of those episodes interfere with all the other shows we'd like to see!

The whole point of us getting TiVo was to watch TV on our schedule. With 106 maximum hours now available, there's a little less panic about keeping up with what we want to see.
Another issue for us was that we wanted to record and keep on hand more children's programming for our 3 kids. I only felt comfortable with keeping 1 or 2 30 minute shows available for them before. Now I can keep entire 2 hour movies on tap for those times when the Wife and I would like to be left alone for a while. And they will be shows that we actually approve of instead of what the networks feel are appropriate at any given time of day.

I hear people say that eventually you get over the feeling that you should keep up with watching everything. But I really want to watch almost everything I've gone to the trouble to record! ;)

Posted by: CoosCoos

quote:
Originally posted by Cruiseraz
Is there something to this or is it just like Tim Allen on Home Improvement "rah rah rah,,,, more power" ? :p

Depends on the person. For those dropping in an extra drive to make it 80 hours, I'm sure it's a legitimate need. For those with the 210+ hour units, it's all about ego. ;)

I started off a year ago with an 30-hour standalone and had every intention of upgrading it. Turns out I never needed to -- it never filled up, even with all recordings on "High Quality".

I got a 20-hour standalone for upstairs and haven't ever filled it up either. The closest I've come is when we were going on vacation for a week and TiVo said some shows were going to be deleted sooner than usual to free up space for other recordings. No problem.

With the standalones, the quality setting mattered quite a bit. Those upgrading probably want to record everything in "Best". Now I have a DirecTiVo and the quality setting is constant, so I don't expect 30 hours to much of a limit. We have 12 Season Passes.

Posted by: Mindwarp

We have in the order of fifty to sixty season passes in our household.

'Nuff said :)

Posted by: Trent Bates

Yeah, I'm around 50 some season passes/wishlists myself!
Only 12 season passes must require some sort of Zen meditative state or something. ;)

Or maybe I waste too much time "meditating" in front of the idiot box myself. :rolleyes:

Posted by: doom1701

A lot of it is an ego thing, which is why we usually report our hours in "Basic" quality, even though nobody actually uses Basic. With the DirecTiVo's, the time reported is a lot more accurate, but who wants to brag about upgrading to 80 "real" hours?

Besides the ego trip, I upgraded my SA (and will upgrade my DTiVo when it arrives) mainly for the variety. We don't watch anything near as much as we TiVo. A LOT of programs fall of the Now Playing list never having been viewed. But, if we only had the default 6 hours of High recording time that we started with, the variety would never be available.

With lots of recording time, we can sit down and have hours worth of various type of programs available. If we feel like 5 hours of Law and Order or Buffy, we can. Not that it happens, but we can if we want :)

Posted by: feldon23

2 DirecTiVos here and I've already delegated the upstairs one to reruns of Law & Order, Star Trek TNG, and The Daily Show.

Wouldn't be enough room downstairs to keep up with all my current programs plus those.

Posted by: Trent Bates

And if you like Law & Order and it's "spinoffs" as much as my Wife does, There's no way that a 35 hour DTivo will keep up with the broadcast schedule! (At least it seems that way!)

It's not about "ego" for me yet. When I start upgrading to 274 hours on each and have five of them around the house, then I might be "addicted"!

I am thinking seriously about getting the Wife her own DTivo soon though. Then she can watch her stuff and I don't have to sit and be bored watching that c... Er. I mean, I can watch my stuff!

Then we'll have to upgrade hers as well. The kids are going to need one soon too. Then we'll have to have one for when company comes over. And it never hurts to have a spare...

Posted by: Sinuralan

My mother has a default 30 hour SA TiVo.
She loves it, but half the functionality of the TiVo is unavailable to her because she never has enough space.

She basically has to watch everything immediately (within a few hours), because there's never romo for anything. She can barely keep 7 things on there.

One day of a tennis tournament might completely fill her space, meaning she's racing to watch stuff before it's deleted.

She regularly has shows disappearing on her when she didn't expect because she had less space than she thought.

She regularly has to fight with the TiVo software to make it record things. It keeps telling her it needs to delete other recordings she has planned to make room, which is true if she doesn't watch them immediately and delete them (instead of their normal expiration time).

Basically, the TiVo is kind of 'broken' for her, but it's better than nothing. SHe watches everything on high (except for news/talk shows, which are at basic).

Now, tell me she doesnt' need more space?
Maybe not 210 hours, but she needs at least double the space.

Personally I have 110 hours and wish I had more. I like archive my favorite episodes of Babylon 5, various movies, etc. I often record 4-10 movies at high quality and don't watch them for weeks. Then when I feel like watching a movie, there it is. When my friends come over and we want to watch a movie, they know I have something good.

To me, 70% of the usefulness of the TiVo comes from time shifting and being able to keep things for as long as I need. If the TiVo doesn't have enough storage to *always* keep things for at least a few weeks, then it's not doing as much as it could be for me. If I have to think, "will I have enough space if I go away for 2weeks", then the TiVo needs more space.

Posted by: drmcm

I can't tell you how nice it is to have a dozen movies waiting around on my TiVo for whenever I feel like one. It's great for the "free preview weekends" of premium channels. My TiVo records like crazy during those weekends and then I will have a bunch of movies to watch. I still have some from the last Showtime preview weekend back in september or something, and then a few from the HBO preview at thanksgiving.

I also like to dump DVD's onto my TiVo for easy watching later. Rent a DVD, dump to TiVo when I go to bed, return the DVD and then just watch it the next day, week, month, whatever. (this works especially well with deals like Blockbuster's 30 DVD's in 30 days, Netflix, etc).

And let me tell you, my kids very much like having a couple Elmo movies always available for playing.

I never worry about shows being deleted, even when I go on vacation for a week or two.

Expanded TiVo's are fantastic! :D

Posted by: Trent Bates

And the cats would surely like one!...

Posted by: JP Honeywell

quote:
Originally posted by JD9900
As soon as I can afford it, I'm throwing in a couple of 160G drives and totally maxing out my storage space. This way I know I'll be fine. :)

Why 160 instead of 140? I thought the OS could only use 137GB from each drive? Is it just that 140GB drives are more expensive or hard to find?

Posted by: Matt9876

Is it Necessary ?????
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For me it brings peace of mind knowing that my wife can record a marathon of shows,soaps,season passes or whatever and the thing never misses a show.

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D-TiVo the best thing since color and bigger hard drives are better !!
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Matt