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It sounds like you prefer FreeView over VM Cable on cost grounds, with TiVo not being a significant element. If you did prefer VM Cable, then TiVo is the best way to watch it.

(Unless you watch a lot of SD, in which case wait for that bug to get fixed first, and/or get an HD TV.)

 

You can't use this pvr with any subscription platform though. It's worth pointing out as well that you are not really receiving anything for free, the BBC is financed by our licence fee, and I suspect the taxpayer chips in to provide some of the infrastructure though I could be wrong.

 

The what?

 

debacle |diˈbakəl; -ˈbäkəl|
noun
a sudden and ignominious failure; a fiasco : the economic debacle that became known as the Great Depression.
ORIGIN early 19th cent.: from French débâcle, from débâcler ‘unleash,’ from dé- ‘un-’ + bâcler ‘to bar’ (from Latin baculum ‘staff’ ).

 

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I actually knew what it meant. My point was that the word certainly does not describe the VM Tivo.

 

It exactly describes it for me and for those others who have been bitterly disappointed!

As an owner of a series one TiVo almost from day one I don't think you appreciate the depth of that disappointment - all that excitement and anticipation dashed. To be honest I don't think you care either - your pedestal is way too high.

I certainly wouldn't be making such negative comments were it a nice bit of kit (IMHO of course)!

 

It's a Tivo. It has Series Links (nee Season Passes), Wishlists and Suggestions.

Yes, it also has some quirks and bugs and is not yet 100% perfect. But then no-one has ever said any different.

As a Series 1 owner since 2002 I do not share your opinion. Oh, and FYI 'pedastals' have nothing to do with anything

 

I didn't mention 'pedastals', don't know what they are.

I was going to respond to the rest of your post, but I really can't be bothered.

 

Really?

(Okay, so I got the spelling wrong. You knew what I meant though.)

Typical response from someone who doesn't actually have answers.

 

How can it have poor picture quality? Surely (unlike the S1) it has exactly the picture quality of a raw cable box?

Personally I'm delighted with mine because it fulfils my one main requirement: it does almost exactly what the S1 did.

(S)

 

There's a problem with SD channels at the moment due to the way the software is de-interlacing and upscaling the picture. See page 8 onwards of this thread for pics. VM are now aware of the problem and are working on a fix.

 

but it's a problem that doesn't affect us all.

 

Seems to me looking at it from the outside that:

a) The functionality is good, basically the same as the S1
b) The aesthetic experience of the UI is poor, certainly worse than the S1 (slow, covered with ads, red), but better than most standalone PVRs
c) There are significant picture quality issues related to the scaling of SD signals. Like most such things, some people can see them, some can't. Some people used S1s in Basic FFS.
d) To get it you have to spend several hundred pounds a year with Virgin
e) Alternatives are either high maintenance (MCE) or also have their own compromises

Depending on how those fit together, combined with your previous experiene of HD sources, lead people to different conclusions.

Clearly for most "a" trumps the lot.

 

That's a pretty good summing-up Stuart.

 

So it would seem. It appears to be similar to the problem that affected the SA V+ boxes where the menus would appear blurry if set to 1080i, but only on certain TVs.

 

as an ex sky+ hd user (though i never really used the hd) the sd is certainly better so the upscaling must be working for me. menus don't matter that much though i'd certainly prefer continuity. i certainly prefer cool blue menus to the virgin red.

 

I believe it affects every current VM TiVo.

I can see it if I switch to channel 999 in 1080i and look closely at the ""Need help getting started" text. I have to be within about 2 foot of my screen, and then I can clearly see banding at the tops and bottoms of the letters. At a distance of about 5ft, it's only noticeable on the thin horizontal strokes of the "e"s and "t"s - they are about 4 pixels thick. If I record the channel, play back the recording, and use cursor-up to switch between video modes, the banding goes away with 576i (but I get other artefacts, presumably from my TV's upscaling), and becomes flicker at 576p and 720p.

My TV is 42". My eyesight is corrected with glasses so ought to be very good when I'm wearing them. My normal viewing distance is about 6.5ft. I find it very hard to see in normal viewing.

I think it's worth disabling 576p and 720p, because the flicker is there if you look for it (and TiVo will switch to 720p automatically for SD content if its enabled), but for me it doesn't really seem worth manually switching into 576i for SD. So you could say that I'm not affected even though my TiVo is. Although they should definitely fix it, it's possible that I won't notice when they do. (I avoid SD as much as I can anyway.)

 

ok you're not wrong about the banding but at 11 feet away it's just not there.

having never seen any previous Virgin sd output i've got nothing to compare it with, it's certainly way better than my early sky+ hd thomson box.

i too steer clear of most sd but there's a good few shows that we watch that are only on an sd channel and all bbc breakfast is viewed on ch 101 and there's nothing lacking in the sd on there.

i wonder if we early S1 deal installations are benefiting from an early production run and they've since had another run delivered which may have different components with tolerences that are less forgiving to the filtering theory being beta tested soon.

who knows? hopefully Virgin do or will soon and get it sorted for the sake of those that are suffering.

 

An excellent summing up. The two paragraphs I have quoted above apply to me. I had to enable mode 0 on my series 1 TiVo and pushed it to give me the best possible picture quality. I went to great lengths to source the best possible Freeview source and was happy with the picture I got - which incidentally was better than the VM TiVo gave me in SD! Having gone through several AD & DA conversions this was no mean feat!