OT: TV delivery alternatives (was: DirecTivo vs. 'New Direct TV DVR'?)

[Ben Scott]

On 5/22/07, Steven W. Orr <steveo at syslang.net> wrote:
> Either I'm a really boring person or TV is getting much better.

  Or we've seen so many years of "Survivor: Vermont" crap that our
standards have been lowered to the point where even descented
excrement looks good by comparison.  ;-)

> I pay close to $60 to include all the pay stuff. HBO, Showtime, etc..

  I was over someone else's place recently, and we ended up watching
"Jaws" on HBO in High Def.  The picture quality was fantastic, but I
was dismayed to realize they had dropped  parts of scenes in places.
Since none of it was offensive (and the rest was uncensored), I can
only assume they're dropping "unimportant" stuff to inflate their
programs-per-time count.  So apparently even the paid stuff is
incomplete these days.

> Currently we will max out with up to 4 simultaneous dvd/vcr
> channels recording at one time. One MythTV box with up to 100 channels
> will solve that problem.

  Be aware that, with MythTV, you need a capture device (i.e., tuner
card) per simultaneous recording, and there are limits to how much
stuff you can stuff down a PCI bus.  Four simultaneous recordings may
be pushing it on anything but a high-end PC.  But one dandy thing
about MythTV is that you can have as many boxes as you want, sharing
recordings via network.

  (Aside #1: You can do that with the Series 2 TiVo boxes, too, but
they had to disable it in the high def Series 3 to get CableLabs
approval.  Ick.)

  (Aside #2: VCR?  Wow, I didn't think anyone still used those.  ;-)  )

-- Ben