HappyMel said:
I have had directv for a long time, due to budgetary reasons I had to stop my service. I bought a tivo from directv and really miss taping my shows. Is there any way I can use my current tivo with my television?
For a more complete explanation.
Your TIVO stores all the recorded programs in MPEG2 format on the Hard Drive. The DirecTV TiVo's do not have/need an MPEG encoder, since the signal that comes from the satellite is already encoded in MPEG2, so it's directly saved to the hard drive in that format.
That's why you cannot use it for cable or normal tv. Since the unit has no MPEG encoder, there's no way to record a normal TV signal. That's why there is a different TiVo altogether. The SA or Stand Alone tivo. It has a mpeg encoder, and can encode your signal perfectly.
If at some point in the future you want to go back to DirecTV, you can use the Stand Alone, but it requires a Stand Alone DirecTV Receiver. This receiver will send the audio/video signal to the Stand Alones audio/video imputs, then the signal will me encoded into mpeg2 and saved to the hard drive.
Of course, if you go back to DTV, it would be best to use the DirecTivo, since it has two tuners, and you can save much more programming on the save size hard drive than the SA.