I already have digital cable and my cable company is coming out with an integrated DVR/digital cable box. It would only cost me an additional $5 to have the integrated DVR box. Would this be just as good as TiVo? I am not sure what to do now. Help!!

I will say that I just bought the TiVo but haven't even signed up for the service or taken it out the box.

I've never had TiVo, but I do have DVR and have been pretty happy with it. If you need to know for comparison purposes, my Time Warner Cable DVR has about 30 hours of recording time. I can record one show and watch another OR record two shows and watch only one of the ones that are being recorded. The DVR has the option of transferring a show you've recorded to a VHS tape but I've never used it. One of the biggest benefits: it's nice to keep the number of boxes down to a minimum, since Mr. Kgsd already has about 37 video game system boxes, plus the DVD player, etc.

I would prefer DVR over TiVo to reduce the number of wires running throughout your system. If you have a choice which box to get, make it a dual tuner, HD. Dual tuner means you can record two programs at the same time and have Picture In Picture even if your TV is old.

100% Tivo. There isn't a DVR out there offered by the cable companies that even comes close to Tivo. DVR's like the ones being offered by Comcast, Time Warner etc... always get terrible reviews.

I take the cable clutter as part of the deal, I can't do without Tivo.

ScottC is right, nothing really compares to TIVO as far as user interface, features, functionality. It really just works great. And, there is a huge community of users who have upgraded, hacked and networked their tivos, so if upgrading and networking is at all interesting to you, there are readily available options for you - if not the ones that are included in the TIVO itself.

Although, today, I find it really hard to make the price/benefit argument. The TIVO at 100-300$ for the box, plus 12.95$ a month fee (yes, this can be lowered, but you have to have been a sub, and call and whine to get it lowered) I find the cost/benefit getting lower. With directv, that is the best choice since one gets a dual tuner tivo for about 50$, and only pays them 5.00$ a month for the tivo service, not the 13$ that tivo demands.

while the cable boxes have a high upside, in low price relative to tivo, their downside is that they haven't had a DUAL TUNER model until just recently. The one that came out a while ago, crashed and burned.

They have only just now come out with a dual tuner, HD model. I think the downsides to that one are that it cannot be upgraded, at least not easily. It doesn't offer a great deal of space, I think 10 hours HD. And I am not sure, but I don't THINK it can record OTA signals. That makes NO sense.

Tivo is going to offering their TIVOtoGO service sometime in Q1 next year, which will allow an actual TIVO owner (not directv tivo owner) to transfer the shows to a computer, or laptop and thereby take in on the road. This is somehthing that you are just NOT going to see from the cabelcos.

So, 60$ a year for reasonable timeshifting ability with the cableco, vs. 100-300$ investment, plus 150$ a year in TIVO fees, only you can decide.

I will say, if you have some technology neophites in da hows, think grandma, older parents, wife who just doesn't get it, etc. Tivo is the easier product to adopt, IMHO. I have had no problem getting my 96 year old grandma up to speed, and my father included. It took my mother all of about 20 seconds to figure it all out. She's a trip!

Let me make a contrarian view -- go w/ the DVR for the cost for now. Since DirecTV ended their investment w/ TiVo a few months back, and DirecTV is bringing out their own DVR based on their existing one used by SkyTV, the main market for TiVo units has dried up.

Since TiVo never made any money anyway, they are in deep do-do now... their main volume customer is gone! The NetFlix deal is not likely to get them anywhere near profitable anytime soon and they have no deals to license their s/w guide -- which is where they excel!

I would return it if you can!

I have RePlayTV and i chose that over the cable DVR and TiVo for several reasons.

RePlay TV offers you some great advantages over TiVo and DVR:
Commercial Skip (yes it will skip the commercials of shows that you have recorded, only on the 5000 models)
Transfer the shows to your computer via DVArchice and watch them on your comptuer.
If you have more than one RePlayTV you can have them on your home network and watch shows recorded on other units in other rooms (ie watch a show in your bedroom that is recorded on your Living Room TV).
If you happen to miss recording a show one week, you can go online and request a show at Poopli.com and have it sent to your RePlay Unit (there are thousands of users willing to share their shows with you).
The Hard Drive's can be upgraded for more space and recording time.
One Time activation fee or pay as you go.

Overall I enjoy my units very much and would not give my cable company any more money then they need to have. As far as TiVo, it is okay but RePlay TV is so much better.

for more info on the Replay TV their website is http://www.replaytv.com

I don't work for them, I just enjoy their services more than TiVo and the Cable Box DVR.

~icorproadie

http://www.corproadie.com

But, the CS feature is only avaialble on older models and no current models. So, a new model won't offer this feature, and I wouldn't recommend getting a used product when new ones are so cheap as they are.

One final point that I didn't put in my above post, was I wouldn't buy ANY model from any manufacturer today that didn't have DUAL TUNERS. You cannot imagine how much more usable the machine is with DUAL TUNERS

I've owned a TiVo Series 2 80GB for about a year now. I love it. "Tivo is Mother. TiVo is Father."

Last month Comcast released the Motorola 6412 dual-tuner High Definition DVR. Grabbed one of them and am now enjoying being able to record "Lost" and "Smallville" at the same time in High Definition (used to TiVo "Lost" in standard definition and watch "Smallville" live). I am slso happy to be able to go to bed at 10pm after "The West Wing", secure in the knowledge that "Law and Order" is being recorded in HD.

That being said, I am still keeping the TiVo. The user interface for TiVo is miles ahead of the Microsoft one the 6412 uses. It is much easier to maintain and work with TiVo's Season Pass. Also, TiVo has a better analog-to-digital converter then the 6412 (the 6412's digital-to-digital compressor is pretty flawless. HD looks great, as does digital SD).

The 6412's big advantage - and it is huge to me - is dual High Definition-capable tuners. While we do not get CBS in HD over cable in Seattle (and probably never will with the whizzing match between Comcast and Cox), being able to record two HD (or one HD and one SD or two SD) channels simultaneously is a godsend when you have two shows at the same time.

But TiVo is much easier to work with.

Tivo. Tivo. Tivo.

I've had one since early 2000 and I can't imagine NOT having one.

The cable DVRs are simply digital VCRS.

The cable company will try to tell you they don't "support" Tivos on their system, and that their units are "tivo-like." Don't buy it. They're trying to make a sale. Tivo's work with all cable company's boxes.

Take your Tivo out of the box and use it for a while. I'll bet you'll feel the same as the rest of us do.

I keep hearing about "Dual Tuners." I would like to hook the TiVo up to our main TV that has the digital cable box. Will I be able to watch one program and TiVo another?

Yes and no.

You can record something off the cable box AND watch something off Tivo.

You can not record something off the cable box and watch something different off the cable box.

That actually isn't that bad, as your Tivo will pretty much always have something decent to watch.

If the cable company is offering you a dual tunner HD DVR for $5 bucks a month that would be my choice (even though I'm a ReplayTV fan). If not, I'd go with Replay for all the reason siCorpRoadie states.

TiVo has a cute user interface, but feature for feature Replay TV is better, provides all its functionality out-of-the box with no additional cost (networking, watch/record shows on other boxes in your house, 480p output, and more). Here's a comparison list Replay comparison.

There are presently no standalone DVR's the have dual tunners and HD, so there isn't a direct one-to-one comparison of STB DVR and Standalone DVR.

We have several tuners on our TV, so we can record with the Tivo box and watch live TV using one of the other tuners (we used a splitter to send the cable signal to this other tuner). Of course, if it's a scrambled channel you won't be able to watch it using that method.

We find that we don't have to do this very often. There's very very little that we will consider watching live. We will watch near-live by waiting 20 minutes & then starting playback, but we've used our old VCR once or twice when 2 shows were on that we wanted to watch. This is a very rare occurrence in our house. Last Sunday we recorded Survivor on the Tivo & Desperate Housewives on the VCR. I can't remember the last time we had to do that.

Keep this in mind. Once you get used to having your Tivo time nor channels are an issue. You probably will only watch the news live. Some people even record the news. You'll always have something on TV to watch and you'll never miss your favorite shows again.

Okay I am confused. How can I watch something different if I am taping something with TiVo? Right now I have my VCR run through the Digital Cable Box. There is only one channel essentially on my VCR. It only tapes/sees whatever the Digital Cable Box is seeing. I want to be able to watch a deifferent digital cable channel than the one TiVo is taping. Is this possible without renting another cable box?