Charlie Kindel › Likes

I've been hearing a lot of people switching to Media Center. My only beef is that I don't want a cable box. If you own an Xbox 360 Media Center is a nice built in extender, along with Vista. - Ryan

but...I love TiVo... How much for a decent media center? - Josh Haley

TiVo as a stand alone company is dying. PVR's from the same company you get media from are pretty good (Comcast, Fios, DirectTV) and much better integrated. Most folks I knew who had TiVo replaced them by now. - Soulhuntre from twhirl

I don't watch much TV, but a card in my PC does just fine, and acts as a PVR if I want it to. - Ian May

I liek the Fios PVR - add in how well WHS works to stream content to my Xbox360 and I am pretty well sorted on this. Next? I want Hulu on the 360 :) - Soulhuntre from twhirl

I love TiVo. Happy to use it everyday, it's been very good to me. Everytime I see someone else's TiVo rip-off, it somehow falls very short. I can't tell why they cant copy it better, but for some reason they don't. TiVo FTW. - Steve Isaacs

if media center allows you to have comcast without the terrible UI, that could be a good solution. DirectTV customer service is so bad- I need to find a replacement when my contract is up mid next year - Tim Connors from mioNews

I am happy with my TiVo HD and may upgrade the series 1 in the other room to a TiVo HD as well. In fact, I bought TiVo stock on Aug. 26 and sold it today, which more than pays for a new unit plus lifetime service. TiVo can't be beat. - Louis Gray

+1 @Steve Isaacs. I had a phase where I used two EyeTV devices with my Mac mini for my HD DVR needs, and it worked fairly well, especially since I could edit and transcode the files as I wished. However, sometimes the set up would fail because of different reasons, like the software encoder process on one of the tuners couldn't handle weaker signals, or for whatever reason a scheduled recording would be missed. I'm back with a TiVo HD and I love it. Rock solid and doesn't take up my computer. - Cheryl Jones

Of course, Elgato recently updated their EyeTV software to have a Season-Pass-like option, and other TiVo-like features, so they might be a good alternative for those not wanting to go with TiVo and are on OS X. I'm sticking to my TiVo for now. - Cheryl Jones

@Sean McGee - does your cable provider offer a PVR? The are usually relaly cheap as an incremental upgrade. Best of both options. - Soulhuntre

I like my (non-DirectTV) TiVo because unlike the majority of PVRs it doesn't lock me in to a single TV provider. - Kevin Fox

Yeah, I won't buy a Tivo. The Verizon FiOS DVR is pretty good, although it does have limited storage (only 180GB). - Alex Scoble

Media Center is one Microsoft product I love...can't live without it - Jeff (the マクダジ of FF)

I've brought up the idea of going with a non-Tivo DVR, but the look on Athena's face made me rethink it. Tivo has been such a wonderful part of our lives since our first (version 1) box (that now lives in my father-in-law's living room). I really like DirecTV and hate Comcast. So, my only real option is to wait until the end of 2009 for the new DirecTivo. - Cyrus Lendvay

Comcast with TIVO HD DVR is pretty awesome. 16 gig broadband, plus $299 dvr. Only limit is no Comcast On Demand. Cable cards don't have 2way working yet. - Keith Teare from feedalizr

@Gregory I broadly agree with you, and particularly find the medical ads trying to turn me into a hypocondriac very annoying. Thing is, very few people complain, and yet many folks online want ad-free free services, and go out of their way to block ads (which you can't do with live TV). - Ian May

I ditched my Tivo in favor of the built in recorder in my Dish Network box. I'm perfectly happy and saving money too. - David Jacobs

Cool. Whether it is deliberate or not, it is lame. Hopefully Google fixes this before more attention is called to it, for Google's sake. - Dare Obasanjo

So if the rankings are normal, they should manipulate the results to artificially lower Knol results just because it's a Google property? Knol got a huge amount of press and links, and has very few actual pages (about 1330, it appears), so it's not surprising that those pages rank high (a lot of pagerank spread among a small number of pages means each page has high-PR). For what it's worth, Wikipedia currently ranks above Knol itself for a search on "knol": http://www.google.com/search... - Paul Buchheit

If the rankings are normal, then there is no cause for concern.So I'll wait to see what Matt Cutts or the Google blog has to say on this. - Dare Obasanjo

Yes, because waiting more than 24 hours to get enough data points before insinuating that Google lied is just so last century? - Daniel Dulitz

Daniel, I need to wait 24 hours before writing a blog post or a tweet about weird results myself and others are seeing from a search engine? Since when? - Dare Obasanjo

Dare, Yahoo ranks a knol page at #2 for the query [Music in Capoeira]. Do you think that Yahoo is pumping up knol rankings too? I left a comment on your blog with more info. - Matt Cutts