Cool Stuff

Would you believe, TiVo?

Stan Spotts — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:28:44 GMT

The primary hard drive in my Vista media center (Dell XPS 410) died a hard death, so I got a new drive and started rebuilding. Well, it turns out that my Vista DVD is pre-sp1, which means the SATA driver I needed wasn't there. I tried getting one from Dell downloads, but it didn't work. I got to the point in setup where it SAID it was copying files, but nothing happened - overnight.

Since I have only a small amount of time late at night for personal projects, after the second day my wife was ready to cut off body parts. Twin 2 year old boys, no TV... not a pretty picture.

So I decided that the TV/DVR wasn't going to be a hobby any more, and bought a TiVo HD unit from Best Buy. I called Verizon to see if I could replace my two STB's with cablecards, which would also give me the high def capability the Dell box lacked (you can do the cablecard/HD configuration with the XPS 420, not 410). I have to say, the Verizon rep (working in Pittsburgh), was GREAT. I don't remember every having a better customer experience. While we were talking, he was reviewing my account - I have phone, internet, and TV service. After reviewing options, he was able to give me the same service - except for swapping the two STB's with two cablecards (they didn't have multi-cards, so I needed two to record two channels at once) - for $178 instead of the $252 I've been paying. Then the bad news - it would be about 2.5 weeks before a technician would be able to come with the cards and install them. Great, those body parts were history.

So the next day just before noon, the rep calls me on my cell phone. He made some calls that morning and a technician was scheduled to come the next day. Sure enough, around 2pm the tech came and an hour or so later got the cablecards installed and TiVo was all set.

The only real issue with the TiVo is that it's only got a 250Gb drive, whereas I had 1.2Tb in my Vista box. The only "approved" way to expand it is to get a 500Gb external drive from WD, called the My DVR something-or-other, and plug it into the eSATA port. It's about $199, so is an option when I need the space.

All is not lost on the XPS 410 box. Once I have the time to get it up and running, I'm going to add a few Gb of RAM and turn it into a video editing machine. I have an HD, 60Gb video recorder and my little laptop doesn't do well editing the movies from it.

Vista MCE running FIOS-TV!

Stan Spotts — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 02:40:00 GMT

Okay, the Verizon installers came out and set things up today. They ran a short coax cable from the outside box (where my fiber terminates) into a splitter, then disconnected my DirecTV lines and connected the cables they used to get to the STB's. Kind of interesting - they had to use special splitters that actually have circuit boards. This is not simply a video signal, it's IPTV. Every connection got tested and retested, and the signal was so strong they had to put an inline widget to reduce it by 3db. Too strong a signal could give the STB's a meltdown.

We had a little issue getting the STB's going. Evidently, the "server" that they connect to had a failure, and the whole country was down. One server? Kind of scary, that.

After it was connected, I went ahead and set up my TV signal in Media Center, and selected Cable this time (used to be satellite). I saw two FIOS selections - one with (Digital) at the end, and one without. Digital gives you all the available stations, and not picking digital just gives you channels 1-49 (local stations). Except for some sound issues, everything went fine. It turned out that the moving around of the Vista box loosened a wire from the sound card, and after I shut down and opened the box I found it, fixed it, and restarted.

One cool thing I found was that all the scheduled recordings were reset to point to the correct channels. That was a nice surprise. So now I've got fiber for phone, TV, and Internet service, and I won't lose my TV signal every time we have a storm. Sweet.

Vista RTM on MSND Subscriber downloads - Thursday!

Stan Spotts — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 02:05:00 GMT

A bit earlier than the announced date (by Friday)… just 3 more hours for my download to complete!

XBox 360!

Stan Spotts — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 05:01:00 GMT

Woo hoo! My XBox 360 arrived today! Maybe by Christmas I'll get to try it :). The controllers are smaller than I expected, but feel nice and solid. I like the way the headset fits on the wireless controller - I hate wires.