11 Ways My Homemade DVR Kicks Tivo’s Tail
1. Unlimited Storage Space
I want every episode of The Office and Arrested Development at my fingertips every minute of the day. The only thing that limits the amount of awesome media I can keep on my homemade DVR is cash. Adding a new hard drive is a piece of cake. Plus, I have far more control over my compression settings, allowing me to squeeze as much as I want to out of my disc space.
2. Mepo
Mepo is the mascot on the Mediaportal skin I use. Unlike Tivo, Mediaportal lets me completely change the look of my DVR. These skins are created by other Mediaportal users and are available for free! I simply love it when people see Mediaportal running and have to ask “What is this!?”
3. Sweet Tunes
My HTPC is like a huge iPod! It offers complete integration with iTunes, Lost.fm, Media Monkey or whatever music software you currently use. There’s nothing like kicking off an iTunes playlist while I cook dinner (complete with awesome visualization of course!). Tivo sure doesn’t offer a way to organize and play my thousands of songs.
4. No monthly fees.
Need I say more?
5. Upgrade to HD? No problem.
To upgrade to high definition, I only have to swap out a $100 card on my HTPC. All my software already supports HD, only the tuner card needs to be switched. I’ll still have all my shows, all my DVDs and all my settings as they were. Can’t say that for Tivo.
6. Built in DVD burner.
If I ever decide to archive some shows to clear up space, I have a DVD burner built right into my HTPC. And of course Mediaportal offers a burner plugin built in because, well, it’s just that awesome.
7. Torrents
I may be bordering on the dark side here, but I recorded all of Lost - Season 3 except for one episode. With my HTPC, I fired up uTorrent and completed my collection in an hour.
8. Emulators
Now I’ve totally gone Vader on you, but it is a fact that Tivo cannot play Pacman, Super Mario Bros or Street Fighter II and my HTPC can. So there.
9. Access to my DVDs
With my aforementioned bulging hard drive space, I can rip my DVD collection right onto my HTPC. With a click, I’m in Middle Earth. You’ll never go back to physical discs again. They’re so 20th century.
10. Internet Enabled
Mediaportal plugins grab movie data, TV summaries, trailers, DVD art, RSS feeds, and Wikipedia articles off the web. Tivo’s internet surfing skills pale in comparison.
11. Moving through Media
Tivo has its signature “bloop” sound when you fast forward, but my HTPC software kicks Tivo’s tail on usability. Instead of fastforwarding, Mediaportal let’s me skip forward 15sec, 1 min, 3 min at a time. It’s a beautiful thing to click over commercials instead of clicking through them. BeyondTV even finds commercials for you overnight so you can skip them with a single click.
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