Derek Bodner’s Blog

I recently broke down and bought a tivo. I don’t really watch much TV, but I mainly wanted one for sports. I tend to not always get out of work on time, and miss the first half of a lot of Sixers games. It’s also nice to be able to tape college games (It’s going to make tournament time infinitely better), and for the rare shows I do watch, it’ll be nice to know I won’t miss any.

Anyway, I ended up getting a series 2 tivo, mainly because I didn’t feel like paying for a series 3, who are still comparatively expensive. I found a really, really good deal on an 80 hour series 2, so I went with it.

I originally set it up in our bedroom, as my main use for it wasn’t so much for live tv (fast forwarding live tv would be nice, though), but to record stuff when I’m away. The TV in our bedroom was pretty much only used in the mornings, and since the series 2 is only a single tuner, I didn’t want to tie up the TV at prime time recording my sixers games and prevent Elyssa from watching TV during that time.

I then decided to take the cable box out of the bedroom, as we really only watch stations we can get on basic cable in there. I brought that into the living room, and hooked the tivo up to that. I have the cable box without the tivo going to input1 in the tv, and the cable box with tivo going to input2 on the tv. The cable box with the tivo hooked up is on the ground and turned around, as I don’t need to change it since the tivo controls it, and the two boxes signals never get crossed up. So now I can have something recording on the tivo, switch inputs, and still be able to watch live tv. The ghetto dual tuner tivo for a third of the price. All in all, the setups nice. It’s nice not missing the first half of sixers games, that’s for sure. And I’ve been extremely impressed with the tivo interface. I don’t even care if that makes me a non-gnu/linux purist.