I was checking out some of the TiVo stuff, and me first thought is why do these things have phone jacks to dial out instead of Ethernet ports? Phone lines are so “old school”. 🙂
I hear everyone talk about TiVo competitors, but I don’t know of any specifically. If someone knows of something similar to TiVo that uses the Internet to get programming data (rather than a phone line), please leave a comment telling me what it is.
Hey Shawn,
The new Tivo’s (series 2 models) have USB ports. To those USB ports you can plug in standard 802.11 wireless adapters or cheap USB to ethernet adapters. So you can indeed use Tivo over ethernet.
Yeah, I saw those. But it seems kind of a lame patch to get Ethernet. What do people use the USB ports for other than to turn them into Ethernet ports with another piece of hardware?
My PC get all the listing information direct from the net. Can record and all the rest… Even intergrates nicely with a satellite dish…
Works similiar to TiVo…
Windows Media Center Edition
Worth a look…
http://www.9thtee.com has ethernet and 802.11b adapter cards. Unfornately they only work on Series 1 Tivos (which is what I have).
Tivo’s are pretty cool to hack around with – I discovered this when the company I work for received a bunch of demo units from Philips when they first launched it. TiVo does not support Canadian guide data but there is a whole community devoted to this and have had it running for about 4 years now.
Replay TV is the only competitor I know of but I do not know much about it other than that it does support ethernet :). You could always go with DirecTivo, it pulls the guide data from the satellite stream.
Check out the following:
ReplayTV 5040 (http://www.replaytv.com), myreplaytv.com, and dvarchive.org. It has ethernet to allow you to not only download program data directly off the net, but also you can view saved programs from one replay on the other…I have four of them in my house and can record 4 different shows at the same time on any machine from the same room.