HD Complex:
This year we decided to buy a big household present for everyone rather than a lot of stuff (of course, Mere still makes out, but…) so the big add was a combination of an HD TV for the living room, and a HD TiVo and a Blu-Ray player to go with it.
This is changing the ‘viewing experience’ quite a bit here.
First, there’s remembering where the heck the HD channels are….I just finished a listing of the channels that we watch and how to find them, with a note on there as to which is HD and which isn’t - and if there’s a HD channel, that’s the one in the listing.
Without the listing, it’s VERY confusing.
The HD TiVo really has much more limited space than the old living room one, and while TiVo touts a ‘DVR Extender’ eSATA hard drive that you can attach to the thing with a Terabyte of space, the things are out of stock and unavailable - apparently Western Digital ran into serious quality problems with the thing and has ‘temporarily’ stopped production. For now, anyway.
That means no pile of stuff on the TiVo that we haven’t gotten around to, and that we’re forced to watch and delete on a real thorough basis.
The HD TiVo does have one very nice feature - it records in HD, of course, but it also can pull down streaming stuff for us from my Netflix account. Some of their movies are set up that way, and we’ve discontinued our movie channels as of yesterday - the Netflix stuff (either rental or streaming) is much more useful and bang-for-the-buck.
It also is able to access YouTube, for what that’s worth.
The quality of the HD images and of the Blu-Ray player is rather good, and we like that part a lot. Both the TiVo and the Blu-Ray are hooked up to the house Ethernet system, and can pull things off it from the Internet or be updated on firmware that way. We only have two Blu-Ray discs at present - my gifts via Sinterklaas - UP and NATIONAL TREASURE, but we haven’t gotten through either yet. In the future, I’ll probably buy either combo packages (DVD, Blu-Ray and ‘downloadable to MP3 Video player’) or Blu-Ray for the future.
Actually, our purchases of DVDs was dropping considerably. Ditto books. Susan and her Mom are on a Sara Paretsky binge at the library, going through the entire oeuvre, and I’m too busy to do much reading for pleasure (and have a huge backlog in any event) right now.