Digital Replacements for Fried TVs and VCR

Tomsic · 2012-01-15T21:38:28+00:00

So, lightning struck a friend's house recently and fried most of the electronics inside including two TV sets, their digital converter boxes, a telephone answering machine, VCR and a clock radio. One of the TVs is fixed; the other was replaced with a flat screen type and we tossed the VCR. It's time to convert to digital.The question is how should we set up the system so my friend can record TV shows when he wants. He likes to record shows late at night and when he's not around and then play them back when he has time. The VCR worked great; but it doesn't make sense to use tape any more. What black box should he get to connect to the TV to do the recording that can be programmed to just record and play back -- no cable, no subscriptions or extra monthly services although I might convince him to get DSL internet service (he still uses dial up).TV recording/playback is the essential thing though.Tomsic

Jan 15, 2012 42 Replies

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trader4 14 years ago

works mostly,

That's quite a deal you got on Ebay! I would not have thought it possible. Tivo was selling the Premier for $300 a year ago. I got $100 off, because I already owned one Tivo, but the whole thing still wound up costing me about $500 with lifetime service.

I just looked at the Tivo website and they are now selling the Premier for $99, which is a great price.

So, for $400 the OP could have a Tivo with lifetime service, which could start to compare favorably with other options for his use. Remaining things to watch out for would be:

A - I've heard the newer ones require a subscription to work even as a dumb recorder. Not sure about that.

B - The Premier requires an ethernet connection which it uses to get the schedules, software updates, etc.

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mike 14 years ago

True, they're boat-anchors. When I find 'em at garage sales for a buck, I buy 'em for the hard drive and scrap the rest.

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mike 14 years ago

My experience has been that you need more than a hyperthreaded 2.8GHZ P4 to run that resource hog. Way too much eye-candy and not enough svelt tv recording. Support for TV cards is also limited. But I do get a nice bunch of expanding graphics menus on the way to, "No TV card Installed".

M$'s idea of plugandplay hardware support is minimum functionality at the lowest-common-denominator of features and no way to access the good stuff...on a limited subset of existing hardware.

I never got MythTV to work properly either with any of my TV cards.

People using payware solutions on specific cards report better results.

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