InterMurph
12-23-2003, 03:13 PM
I am not a beta tester for this product, but I saw one of these units in action yesterday. Naturally I can't say where, or who.
From the front, it looks exactly like the Hughes HDVR2 unit, except that in place of the Hughes logo, there is a DirecTV logo.
Technically speaking, it has two HD satellite inputs and one over-the-air input. The OTA signal is split internally, so you don't have to run two cables. The rest of the info around this is correct: you can record two shows at once, in any combination of OTA and HD satellite.
It has a single 250GB disk.
When you are watching a non-HD show, the TiVo unit can either stretch the image to fit the TV, or it can add bars on the left and right of the picture to maintain the original size/ratio. The color of the bars can be specified; I saw them set to gray.
Somebody told me that they would prefer that the TiVo not do any of this, since his Panasonic plasma TV did a much better job of stretching, adding bars, etc.
This same person also cycled through the various output formats (720p, 720i, 1080p, 1080i), and I'm 95% sure that he did this with the TiVo remote.
The best part of the demo was the pre-recorded HD show selection. It was the Patriots-Jets game from Saturday, and it was cued up to the infamous Joe Namath/Suzy Kolber interview. I hadn't seen it before, and it was positively creepy in HD!
That's just about all I know about the unit, except that it made me want to run out and buy a Panasonic plasma TV.
From the front, it looks exactly like the Hughes HDVR2 unit, except that in place of the Hughes logo, there is a DirecTV logo.
Technically speaking, it has two HD satellite inputs and one over-the-air input. The OTA signal is split internally, so you don't have to run two cables. The rest of the info around this is correct: you can record two shows at once, in any combination of OTA and HD satellite.
It has a single 250GB disk.
When you are watching a non-HD show, the TiVo unit can either stretch the image to fit the TV, or it can add bars on the left and right of the picture to maintain the original size/ratio. The color of the bars can be specified; I saw them set to gray.
Somebody told me that they would prefer that the TiVo not do any of this, since his Panasonic plasma TV did a much better job of stretching, adding bars, etc.
This same person also cycled through the various output formats (720p, 720i, 1080p, 1080i), and I'm 95% sure that he did this with the TiVo remote.
The best part of the demo was the pre-recorded HD show selection. It was the Patriots-Jets game from Saturday, and it was cued up to the infamous Joe Namath/Suzy Kolber interview. I hadn't seen it before, and it was positively creepy in HD!
That's just about all I know about the unit, except that it made me want to run out and buy a Panasonic plasma TV.