What is better than TiVo?

More TiVo! I have had my TiVo for five months and everyday I find more and more to do with it. Last week I learned how to make Peanut Brittle with it. The TiVo offers so many other services that I can hardly keep them straight. The only draw back is that I run out of room on the TiVo. My TiVo is an 80 hour Dual Tuner. Which mean on the Basic Quality setting you can record 80 hours of TV. Basically, the TiVo has an 80-gigabyte hard drive and basic quality files take up about 1 gigabyte per hour of video. I never watch anything in basic quality. The picture quality is crap at that level, so I never use it. That leave me about only 40-50 hours of good quality video, if I chose the Best quality I get about 25 hours of video. This would be ok if I watch mall my show within 48 hours and then delete my stuff, and turn off my TiVo suggested programs. However that's not my style of watching TiVo.

I like recording all my favorite show by the season. I use the season pass function to do this. I like to keep all the show in a season so I can go back and review anything I missed. This mean I need 13 hours for Cable series and 22 – 26 for Network shows. It’s a good thing I don’t watch soaps. I also like having things picked for me by TiVo, and all the special show content that comes with TiVo recorded. I also like to record all those Sci-Fi Channel marathons they like to run. Which mean this could be a lot of hours on the TiVo. Some of the shows I recorded may not get viewed for weeks. I still have “The Lost Room” from Sci-Fi on my TiVo. Other shows I hold on to until I can burn them on to DVD. And heaven knows when the High Priestess will get around to watching the shows I TiVo’ed for her. To make a long story short, I run out of room a lot!

I was thinking of upgrading my TiVo, but how? The People at TiVo suggest I buy another unit or trade up to a 180-hour TiVo. I recalled seeing a book called “Hacking TiVo”. It gave suggestion about replacing the hard drive for a bigger hard drive, because the TiVo is really just a Linux computer. A neat idea, but you need to copy the TiVo software over. That’s not a simple task. Then I stable upon the TiVo Community and they lead me to Weaknees, a TiVo upgrade company. The sell kits for adding or replacing a hard drive in your TiVo. PERFECT! YIPPIE! Ultimate Power is Now MINE!

I today I received my 500 Gigabyte secondary drive for my TiVo! After 30 minutes of work my TiVo (maybe I should start calling her Tina?) now holds up to 650 hours of basic quality video. That means I have about 290 hours of high quality video or even 180 hours of best quality. I am very happy camper.