Be Excellent To Each Other

The first time was 4 years before you left school.

Hang on, what about the time when you came to Nottingham and we went out just the two of us? It can't have happened then.

So yeah, TiVo and shit.

I may have changed the numbers for comedy effect.

Bloody accountants.

I'm due to have full Virgin package installed tomorrow morning including 100mb fibre (which has already been upgraded to 120mb as part of some promotion or another) and a 1TB TiVo box.

I know someone who works for Virgin so I managed get their Mates Rates tariff. Effectively a 40-45% discount on my monthly bill. Nice. Should save about £40 a month compared to my existing Sky package and gain faster BB and a tv box for another room. Winner.

So let's hope this dude turns up tomorrow - I've had three letters, two texts, three emails and a phone call all reminding me that this is booked for tmw morning. I'm guessing that they have problems with people just not being in when their engineer turns up.

Too late now, but if it was an option I'd have gone for the cheaper 50meg BB. Even a heavy user (and I'm a heavy user in every sense of the word) hardly scratches the surface of 120meg.

Ah well, I'll bare that in mind. It might be that I can crank it back in a few months. Still, the novelty value of having 120meg should be good fun for a few weeks.

Unless you're downloading large files from a really fast server, there's no difference between it and 50meg at all.

I'm getting this too!

I got the Sky Switcher offer so I get a TiVo and an extra HD box for my bedroom. Plus the Internet bands up to 60 megatrons! No more 3 hour waits to download stuff.

You know what I was getting on Sky's 8 meg service? 2-4 megas. My fecking 3G signal was often working faster. Tits.

Plus I've got their phone service and ditched BT. The scumbags.

It's coming 6 Nov and I couldn't be happier about the amount of cancer inducing wireless beams zapping into my frontal lobe.

Oh. Well, at least that means I'll be getting the fastest speed possible from newsgroups when I'm downloading all of those . . . . errr . . . Linux Distros.

Yes indeed. I fetch my distros from newsgroups at 12.2MB/s (note the big 'b').

That's more than a Linux distro every three minutes, assuming you only download MKV HD Linux distros.

Installation happened on Saturday a bit of a mixed bag really.

Everything was up and running and then I noticed that they had installed a 500gb box not the 1TB I ordered. So they quickly swapped that out but in doing so all of the BB went down. Bugger.

Had to wait about two hours for the connection to come back up. After that all was good. Except HD channels and On Demand stuff wasn't working - Grrr. Quick call to Virgin and was told to wait 24 hours and it would sort itself out. Ok, not great but not the end of the world. Got up Sunday morning and all was good.

So yeah, well happy with the TV box so far. Takes some getting used to after using Sky for 10 years. Series linking seems to be a bit more of a faff than with Sky but it's obviously doing more clever stuff - like yoinking things we might like. Picture quality is very good and On Demand stuff is extensive. So yeah quite happy with that.

As for BB, quick speed test shows that my 'up to 120MB' package is effectively 75MB. Downloading at approx 8MB/s from newsgroups. Not to be sniffed at I suppose.

I think I'll run out of disk/server space or inspiration soon.

On the whole, very happy.

Do you not find the fast-forward / rewinding annoying, though?

Which bit? I don't think I've had to do any rwd/ffwd yet?

The slight lag between pressing pause and it actually pausing is slightly annoying?

i was careful not to point it out in case you haven't noticed it yet, but

I have to make my own "bloop, bloop, bloop" noises now I have Sky+

30 second skip and a FF that rewound by 10 seconds when you stopped it, I miss my Tivo.

IS THAT ON PURPOSE?!

I hate that!

Ah I see, this is the kind of shit that will get on my tits quite quickly.

Will check it out when I get home.

It is on purpose. So you can FF at the highest speed, see that the show has started, hit play and it actually goes back to the start of the show, rather than playing from 10 seconds in when you have realised. It worked well for me, maybe your reactions are much better than mine

I think you can turn it off though.

[edit]You can't. It is deliberate though - patented and everything. I thought it was just lag.

You can, apparently, press pause and it will stop at exactly what the screen shows.

Well, I think you could in the original Tivo, no idea on the Virgin box.

Researching a bit, they seem to have halved the FF speed compared to proper tivo (I assume due to advertisers complaining) but not changed the auto-correct jump back duration, which is why it is broken.

How is the 30 second skip? It used to be immediate, so you could press it 8 times and be through the majority of advert breaks in under a second, but some people are saying that it isn't an instant skip anymore, it is a fast forward?

Yes, it fast forwards normally for 30 seconds then stops (unless you press it twice, then it fast forwards 60 seconds, etc).
Shame it doesn't just "jump".

That sucks, it used to jump, it was awesome.

The 'jump back' functionality is weird at first, but once you remember to use it sensibly it's just miles better than the Sky one.

As I am well up to date, I will be having my TiVo™ installed next tuesday. Looking forward to it. It'll be a shame to wave goodbye to the TV portion of Media Centre after 9 years, but it looks increasingly likely that Microsoft will be retiring it soon. Time to get excited

And there's this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24024364

Anyone here been contacted?

Nope, but I hope they put me in the trial.

It's TiVo day today!

I've been thoroughly underwhelmed by it so far.

I hoping to be at least whelmed by it.

It's not as good as the Sky+HD box imo.

Fair enough. As long as the PVR works well and the guide-integrated Catch-up stuff is seamless, I'll be a happy man.

Also, the in-built Netflix will be a huge boon. If it did DNLA streaming then I'd be in media-hog's heaven.

It's far better!

Nope.

It was a few years back. Has Sky + HD substantially improved?

I have a Sky+HD box right next to me at work and I hate the interface. Getting to recordings is unnecessarily complex. Why not have a button?

Uh? If you're watching TV and you press the play button, it takes you straight to the list of recorded programmes.

That's weird, I've just moved from a Sky+HD box and found it much more intuitive. It's probably because we're used to the other one.

Does it now? TESTING!

EDIT: Well blow me down with a rubberized remote controller, it does.

If you were previously watching something, it takes you to blurb for that program, and pressing it again, starts it playing.

Malc

Yup.

Nu-uh.

I didn't have much chance to play with it last night ( ) but it seemed to be very impressive, in an understated and dull sort of way. It works. There's not much more you can say about it.

Things that did bug me:

-I can't hide the channels that I'm not subscribed to. I know I can set up a favourites list but it's not the same.
-The settings menu is SD. Why?
-Red. Red everywhere!
-The scroll-back through the guide for catchup only seems to go back 24hrs. I thought this was 7 days.

I'll give more thoughts when I've played more.

Can you do that on Sky? That would be useful. I'd also like to re-order the EPG to put all the channels I watch up front. In fact, it should do that for me.

I dunno about Sky, but Media Center has always let you hide and reorder channels and even change channel numbers if you wish. I'd like the replace BBC1, BBC2, ITV, C4 and five with their HD equivalents as I'm unlikely to watch the SD ones with HD available.

Have to agree although you don't get your local news with BBC HD. Pifff what a shame!

The thing I miss most about Tivo, is "season passes" that work across seasons. I only caught the new series of Wheeler Dealers by accident last night on Sky, if I still had my Tivo it would have picked it up automatically.