Sunday and Monday I spent time working on my Tivo. I have (had) a 40 hour original Phillips Tivo that I had hacked to a 160 hours. Well as I said earlier it died. My online searching said that the problem I was having could be the hard drive or the unit itself. I went out and downloaded InstantCake from PTVUpgrade. I originally had PTVUpgrade do the hacking for my Tivo so I figured I would check them out. IntantCake allowed me to prepare a new hard drive for the Tivo in hopes that the original drive was dead.
After spending most of monday trying to get 3 old computers to get drives working in the exact way InstantCake wanted I was finally able to get instantcake to build a drive. I don’t really blame instantcake for my woes there. They had strict requirements that I just had trouble getting to work with some old PIII 700’s. Once the drive was built I plugged it in to the old Tivo. No dice. The same problem happened again. It looked like my old Tivo finally died. We had a little more than 3 years together. I am upset that our relationship is over early, but I will get by.
I went to Best Buy near my apartment and picked up a new Tivo Series 2 80 hour DVR. I got it home and Jayson brought over a USB nic card that he had (I bribed him with Pizzeria Uno). The Tivo for some reason keep rebooting itself. The online community didn’t say very much about this problem other than it is very bad and I should bring back the unit. So after only 3 hours with it, my Series 2 Tivo went back and I got another shinny new one. This time the setup was a snap and I have been happy (or kind of happy, I did have to blow $299 before rebate on tech I already had but it broke)
At the same time on Monday I decided that the ATI All In Wonder video capture system was not doing it for me. I did some research on a product that looked like a good Digital Video Recorder (DVR) for the PC. Beyond TV from Snapstream got my interest. the problem was the demo sucked on my ATI card since the ATI card did software MPEG-2 encoding. If I knew that I would never have bought the card. The software itself looked awesome. So I took the plunge and bought a bundle of Beyond TV 3.5 and a Hauppauge USB2 video capture device. I got it yesterday and it rocks so far. I am now just programing it up, but it looks like most of the Tivo functionality on my PC. and I have full access to the MPEG-2 files it creates. The bundle even came with its own remote that actually works. It is nice.
These new hardware investments are now funded by the sale of all that old gear I got rid of over the past 2 months. Easy come, easy go I guess. I am at least using this gear. I am addicted to video capture recently, what can I say.