Tivo opinions, anyone?

[kaydubya]

So we're thinking about making the big leap from a VCR to a DVR, either Tivo or through one of the dish companies. I'm interested in opinions on the options. Consider that for us to go to a dish with all of the options we want would probably double our bill over what we pay for cable (something like 32 or 37 per month -- gotta love the small town cable provider).

Some specific questions:

- I've heard stories that Tivo will delete shows if you don't watch them within a week of recording. True/false?

- Is a subscription to the Tivo service absolutely required to use the thing? Or will it function like a VCR with the ability to manually set shows to record?

- With cable networks especially, it's typical to run a new episode of a show multiple times in a week. Is Tivo smart enough to record only the first instance?

TIA for your input!

[Aoife]

Your stuff will be deleted if you've not set them to keep and you run out of space. It may be shorter or longer than a week. It's based on amount of space and what you plan to record, not random time amounts. It will show you which ones will be deleted, you can change the settings so that certain series will never get deleted without you manually doing it, etc. It also allows you to set the importance of shows… so say you let it automatically delete both "the simpsons" and "south park" but you'd rather it drop simpsons before sp… you can do that. You can have it delete absolutely nothing on it's own, but then it eventually may not have the space for new stuff. Included in all this is the stuff it records randomly as suggestions to you, based on what you like and rate such… those things always go first.

You need the service.

Only the first run episode is labeled as new ever. All subsequent runs are reruns. You understand it as a new episode, but dvrs see them as either first run or repeat, and first run means FIRST run. If there's conflicts you can usually schedule the later run "new" episode as what you record, say when a cable show conflicts with a network show that won't rerun.