TiVo refreshes lineup with 6-tuner Roamio DVRs

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Mine is out for delivery from UPS, so I should have it set up this evening (UPS usually comes after 5pm). It will be interesting to see how well the OTA tuner works. Hopefully as well as the series 3 and not the premiere. But, I have really, really strong signals (farthest tower is 30 miles away and I am using a 9' deep fringe UHF antenna)...
 
Well I have the new Roamio DVR, but am waiting on a new HD to arrive. It seems that you can just remove the internal drive and slide in a 2 TB WD AV-GP drive before you initially turn on the unit and it will just take it and give you 2 TB of recording space. So, I guess Tuesday is when I will play with it.
 
jayn_j said:
From an earlier discussion on TIVO abandoning the OTA market


There will be a single model that supports OTA. It is the bottom of the line, with only 4 tuners and without the streaming and wi-fi. It also has a smaller HD than the other two. What's up TIVO? Are you not aware of a growing trend toward cable cutting and online content? I guess they think cable cutters are cheap and unwilling to invest.
Click to expand...

Not that we, cable cutters, are cheap, but the reason we cut the cord is the cost vs value of pay TV. I have a TIVO however it came with a special rate of $9.95. I certainly wouldn't pay any more than that and if I didn't need it to be the tuner for my primary TV, the ATSC tuner is not working, I wouldn't have it at all. In all honesty we rarely record anything, and most shows that we watch are available on HuLu, so it's not a big deal to us.
I do agree that TIVO is certainly ignoring a growing market, although they may be betting that most cable cutters already have a streaming device, ROKU, Apple TV, Blue Ray Player etc...


Ross

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Well it turns out that TiVo really did not ignore the OTA only crowd. It seems that at this time you can get up to a 3TB disk, Western Digital AV-GP series and put it in the 4 tuner OTA unit and it will just work. If you do not want to do the replacement yourself you can buy at http://www.weaknees.com/tivo-roamio-series5.php#roamio

Essentially they charge you about $50 more for the unit+disk than you buying the unit and disk and putting it in yourself.

Reports from the tivocommunity.com indicate that they have fixed the OTA tuner (the Premiere had a bad OTA tuner) and it works great.

So, an easy solution exists for cord cutters.
 
I finally got back in town and set mine up. For whatever reason it was having issues downloading and updating off my Ethernet connection, so I went to WiFi and it went more smoothly.

Until I could get the call in and download working, it would reboot, notice my 1TB WD AV Expander, but then tell me it was unsupported. After those kinks worked out, it recognized the AV DVR Expander and formatted it.

Speed is good, I like the look, and to my eyes OTA PQ is more crisp than Dish. I'm able to flip back and forth, so maybe that it's a newer chip or its doing some sort of undefeatable edge enhancement. Looks great regardless, and I like having native. Downloaded a 1080p/24 episode of Hell on Wheels from Amazon VOD (1.7gb's in size) and the PQ is outstanding. Roamio outputs 1080p/24 without a hitch as far as I can tell.

I used to love the auto downloads for season passes on Amazon, and I will be using that a lot moving forward. Other than the buggy setup for me, no complaints yet. I also tried out recording 4 OTA shows at once, while downloading an Amazon TV show, worked fine.

OTA tuner seems to report lower than expected, but it seems to perform better. For example, my local CBS and ABC are usually 100% on anything I try in the living room, but the Roamio reports 85%. I am not able to get fox OTA because of dropouts with the Hopper tuner, and a SS around 60%. TiVo report 50-55% for Fox but I watched it 30 mins last night and no drop. When the fall kicks off Ill try recording a few shows and see how they do.
 
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gadgtfreek said:
Mike, have you ever had a tv show say "This video is not TiVo compatible"?

I cannot download episodes of Fx's the Bridge.
Click to expand...

No, Amazon shows TiVo on its list of devices on the instant video page for that show. I bet they will clear it up, perhaps you can write them and they can get it fixed.
 
I got a reply and they said they dont understand why, and just refunded the money. Not the result I wanted. I wonder if I can download if I buy it in the Tivo Amazon menu?

Tivo says that generally means Amazon has blocked it due to licensing.
 
gadgtfreek said:
I got a reply and they said they dont understand why, and just refunded the money. Not the result I wanted. I wonder if I can download if I buy it in the Tivo Amazon menu?

Tivo says that generally means Amazon has blocked it due to licensing.
Click to expand...

Might have to go with iTunes. I had the same issue last year when Viacom and DIRECTV were fighting. All the Viacom shows got blocked on Amazon VOD during the fight (they refunded my money), I switched over to iTunes.
 
gadgtfreek said:
Thats dumb. Im really trying to avoid the whole streaming part of the equation. I wish the ATV still had a HDD.
Click to expand...

It has a flash drive instead. It does download the shows to the internal storage, so trick play does work. If you have a slow connection but want the full 1080p you have to start the episode and it will tell you when to come back and it will be downloaded. Unfortunately I do not see a way to auto download new episodes like TiVo/Amazon combination does.

I would guess that it is 8-16 or so GB since it can hold a few movies and TV shows before they are recycled.
 
I loved my Series 3 THX model. The Premier was nice, but the whole point of upgrading was the more HD menu's, which caused it to be buggy, so I went back to SD. I sold it when I stopped using them for OTA. As much as I love my Hopper it annoys me to record one OTA program here, and one there, and trying to manage timers. Trading one Hopper for the Roamio and its 4 tuners allows me to record all the OTA I want, get several shows on Amazon VOD, and then get some sat stuff on the Hopper with sling.

I still can't believe that the Roamio has a couple of SD menus, I mean cmon Tivo. So far the Roamio is working without a hitch, PQ is excellent on OTA and the 1080p/24 tv show files, and menus look good (except the SD ones). Temp is staying about 114 degrees, so thats good too.
 
TiVo using Adobe Flash to do the HD menus really set them back in the reliability department as it was pretty buggy. They have slowly gotten the bugs out and the Premiere line is solid now. With each update (I think they do 2 major ones a year) they convert more and more menus to HD.
 
If you go to the technical section of TIVO Community, you can find software and procedures to transfer the recorded content to the new hard drive.
 
Its not worth the trouble.

I only have two OTA programs which I will watch tonight. The rest are Amazon tv show downloads that I can re-download tomorrow evening after the drive is in. Im just gonna swap the drives real quick tomorrow and go to town.
 

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