For anyone interested, I thought I’d post my experiences with the series 3 after about a week of playing with it. I’d forgotten just how old of a software version I was on with the series 1. The new software has some nice features like having folders by show in the now playing list. I kind of like having another folder with the HD shows grouped together. The guide data looks nicer than it used to and there is a little HD icon if you are flipping through looking for HD or just wondering if that show coming on at 10 is in HD. The other feature that will be nice is the ability to simply clip off the first or last couple of minutes of a show if there is a slight overlap. Somewhere after software version 3 they introduced it and I’ve been sol in terms of software updates since then.
I’m looking forward to playing around with the online features when my account gets sorted out. There were some issues transferring my lifetime membership to the series 3. Currently, customer support says that they are convinced that everything is fine for the service transfer offer, but their computer system still needs some convincing.
The main reason I wanted the series 3 was for recording HD content, so on Monday I scheduled by cablecard install from Comcast. Until then, I decided to see if I could get over the air digital working so that I could get HD that way. I got a $20 Terk antenna at Fry’s just to see if it would work, and I was pretty impressed. I had to go through some of the guided setup of the tivo again to enable the cable channels, but after that, I was flipping through them just fine. There are a few channels like the CW and alternate KQED digital channels that I’ll probably leave enabled since comcast doesn’t carry them. The tivo has a screen to show you the signal strength of the channels as you flip through them so that you can see if they might cut out. The one irritating thing is that there seemed to be no way to disable channels from the channel list while you were viewing the signal strength. I had to just write them down and then go in and change the list later. Out of about 30 – 40 digital channels that tivo had guide data for, I could probably receive 15 and actually cared about 10. After all was said and done, I recorded Smallville, CSI, and some other shows in HD, and they all came out looking great. The odd thing is that the channels seemed to go off during the day but were back on by primetime.
During the day today, I got the cablecards installed. I had read about people having some bad experiences, so I was prepared for the worst. Both of the cards that the tech brought with him worked in the end, but it took him about 2 hours and a lot of sitting around before he could get it working. In the end, he had a lot of conversations with someone at comcast about the fact that the cards were going into a tivo that involved him saying HD and tivo a lot.
From what I’ve seen, the feature set is really similar to the HD DirectTivo that came out a long time ago (at least, it seems like a long time ago to me). The series 3 has a cool little display on the front and has more network features enabled, but the only big differences I can see are the CableCard instead of DirectTV, the THX certification, and the eSATA back connector that will probably be enabled for storage expansion at some later date. If you’ve already got the HD DirectTivo, I don’t think you have any reason to be really envious, but I couldn’t find anything that should prevent someone from spending the money if they’ve got digital cable (other than the paying the high early adopter cost).
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