You
might ask yourself "How the heck is this confangled
contraption taping so much!?", "I haven't put
one tape in there. It's gotta run out of space some time!?".
Well, it's a little like a computer in there, but with
one purpose, to record TV very well. Think of it as a
specialist.
Think
of TV as information. When you do that it s not to
hard to figure out how a TiVo can store so much information.
Your computer can hold tons of information, and remember,
TiVo is a specialist computer. It's very good at storing
TV information, and it's storing it on a hard drive. Thats
where the various prices in TiVo come in. Bigger hard
drive = more recording time (and more cost).
Do you need that extra recording
time? Well, thats alot like those VHS tapes. If you
watch the tapes as you record, then you can just tape
over the old one. If you had a 30 hour VHS tape, how often
would you have to watch the shows on it to keep from taping
over something you wanted to keep. Probably not that often!
You can find a level of recording time that is good for
you and not to tough on the wallet. As with everything,
you probably want to error on the side of too much time.
Panasonic 20 hour
PV-HS1000 ShowStopper
Philips
models are designated PTV100/HDR112 (14 hours), HDR212
(20 hours), PTV300/HDR312 (30 hours), and HDR612 (60 hours).
Sony's model is SVR-2000 (30 hours). Thomson's model (40
hours) is manufactured under the Scenium brand and available
in the U.K. only.
PTV units are digital; they record shows
in MPEG II format on a specially designed Quantum QuickView
simultaneous read/write hard drive. Some of this hard
drive space is used to store program guide information,
some for live TV buffering, and the rest for recording
shows. The amount of space used by a recording depends
on its compression rate: the number of bits it writes
to the hard drive per second. The higher the rate, the
better the recording quality, but the more the drive space
is used up.
Down the line, you might find your
hard drive is too small and want to upgrade it. Theoretically,
this happens by plugging a second hard drive into the
PTV's FireWire port (if it has one), or sending it to
the manufacturer.
"Great another computer to mess
with my head!" Yes, but no. TiVo knew that the
average person is going to use it, not some computer geek
(like me). So they made software that makes it easy to
use. If they didn't, not many people would buy it. They
made it as friendly as possible, using words everyone
knows.
