God, not Showtime... I don't want to have to pay for yet another cable channel to go with the 150 I already have...

Gah. Heh... they have enough trouble keeping Gigi in her clothes as it is! :)

We're getting a new house, might get a dish for it. That'll probably be the only way I get "real" cable. The "extended basic" is nearly $50/month at our new place!

If you wait a couple of months the Series|2 DirecTiVo will be out. The guys on the TiVo Community reckon there will be good deals for new subscribers. (I'm Robert S on that site). I don't recall you mentioning TiVo, so I assume you haven't got one.

Trust me, they're extremely cool.

The DTiVo integrates a DTV tuner which means it can record two DTV channels simultaneously (the down side is it's tied to DTV whereas normal TiVoes can be used with any composite or RF source). There's nothing wrong with the current DTiVoes (actually they're more hackable than the new ones) but they're hard to find as they've gone out of production to make way for the new model.

Oh I gots me a TiVo. I gots it good. Bought a basic 16 hour unit on e-bay just before x-mas last year. As soon as the warranty runs out I'm dropping whatever $150 buys me in IDE HD space and an ethernet card. Maybe even a wireless ethernet card. 60+ hours and no more phone line.

Changed the way I watch TV and probably saved my marriage.

But I may wait for the new one anyway. Two channels at once is pretty darned cool.

I wouldn't worry about the warranty. The hard drive upgrade is very safe if you replace the existing drive. I haven't got into the Ethernet hacking side of things - it's a VCR for goodness' sake! (TiVo calls are still free over here anyway). $99 (after rebate) gets you a 120Gb hard drive (~140 hours on an SA) and TiVo can currently only use the first 137Gb of a hard drive anyway. You'll find the upgrade no hassle at all - use New Hinsdale and MFS Tools 2.0. The only things that seem to give trouble are the hard drives, modems and power supplies and hard drives are by far the most troublesome.

We don't yet know if the new DTiVoes will be upgradable - DTV tend to lock things down more tightly than the stand alones - but TiVo has never shown any indication of unhappiness with people adding large hard drives to their TiVoes (the Series|2 standalones are hack-proof, but it doesn't interfere with adding bigger drives). You might want to wait for confirmation of the upgradability of the new DTiVoes before you commit. They should have a USB port, though, which makes getting your daily calls over the Net very easy.

I wasn't actually planning on replacing the drive. As I understand it (and I could very well be wrong), you can add a second hard drive to a single drive unit with just a bit of tinkering.

I'm interested in the ethernet stuff because it's easier (for me) to hang more stuff off my cable modem connection than it is to hang stuff off the phone. Fewer cables to run around, less static from the wife unit.

Thanks for the note about the GB limit. I've been living in reasonable happiness within the 14 hrs I have, so from this end of the stick 60 looks like huge amounts.

I had a bad experience with the TiVo when I first go it... it was a re-manufactured unit and the modem died (AFAIK modem issues were a common problem?), so I'm gonna be anal and wait a bit. But that's just my politics :).

I'm just worried about them putting some sort of copy protection widget into the mix.

TiVo seem to have tacitly admitted that the Series 1 modem is crap. The Series 2s have much better modems. You can get the modem repaired for less than the cost of a warranty repair, or you can replace it with TiVoNet or an external modem.

The hack to add a B drive only works if you have an unmodified A drive - if your A drive has been upgraded things blow up in your face. You can use MFS Tools to add a B drive later, it's only slightly harder than using BlessTiVo.

It depends what you mean by 'copy protection'. It's currently impossible to digitally copy video off the Series 2 hard drives and I don't doubt that'll be the same for the S2 DTiVoes. They can put MacroVision coding on the datastream to prevent you copying to a VCR, but that would be the same whether you had the TiVo or not. It looks like Macrovision is more trouble than it's worth anyway.

Sorry, brain-fade there - I misread your first sentence. Definitely replace your A drive. If you want to save your recordings you can use MFS Tools to copy them on to the new drive (you set up a pipe with the backup function piped to the restore). This is so you can continue to run in a single drive config (cooler, quieter), you can revert to the original spec if you get a problem and you can safely add a big B drive later.

You won't notice the extra capacity of a 14Gb drive. And, strange as it may seem, you can safely re-purpose the old drive in a PC because you'll make a small (~400Mb) backup that will allow you to recreate the original A drive if necessary.