I did use MRV on my S2 boxes, but that was mostly to handle tuner conflict issues. I’d use the S2 in my bedroom to record shows that conflicted with a show I was recording on the S2 in my living room. Since the S3 is dual-tuner, my need for MRV dropped dramatically. I do miss it from time to time, but I can live with it. I do hope they work things out and get it enabled later.

TiVoToGo I used even less than MRV. I think the main use I put it to was compiling an archive of The Tick! (The animated version.) I played with it, moving video to my laptop and transcoding for my Treo, but, honestly, it didn’t excite me. It was more hassle than it was worth.

Instead I have a Slingbox Pro and I access my S3 real-time from my laptop or Treo now. No transcoding, no copying, etc. Immediate access to anything on the box, from anywhere. That’s a superior solution for me.

I’ve used cable DVRs, and TiVo’s interface isn’t just better – it is VASTLY better. And feature-wise the cable DVRs don’t measure up either. They tend to be lucky to match basic Season Pass abilities – some cable DVRs have issues just recording first-run only, etc. None of them match WishLists, and I use them a lot on my TiVos. Some of the things I do with WishLists I could partially fake with Season Passes – instead of a Title Wishlist I could do multiple Season Passes for shows that air on multiple channels – but for most things I couldn’t – I have an number of Actor, Director, Keyword, and Category WishLists.

I also subscribe to a number of TiVoCast channels, and I’ve been using Amazon Unbox on TiVo fairly regularly now. I also make use of the music playback and, to a lesser degree, photo viewing.

I held off on going HD for a few years. I really don’t watch a lot of network TV, so I still only get a handful of my shows in HD. My cable operator doesn’t have HD versions of some channels – like National Geographic HD – which I’d use. The good thing is, the S3 produces a noticeably better image from SD digital cable channels than the S2 with a box did, so I get benefit there as well.

I purchased my last SD television in 1994, a 32″ set. I told myself then that I’d keep it at least 10 years, then move to HD. (Even in 1994, HD was ‘coming soon’.)

Of course, in 2004 I was a TiVo user, and not willing to give that up. There also wasn’t a lot of HD content yet (less than today) for me, and HD sets were still pretty costly. So I waited for the S3 to come out, and then I made the jump – got a 61″ DLP and the S3. It was worth the wait – I could afford a larger, better screen and the S3 is a great box.

I don’t know that I can tell a difference between 720p and 1080i, and of course there’s no real 1080p content out there to compare to regardless of what someone’s television is capable of.

Plus there are others who don’t know the difference between 720p and 1080i and still others who think they have HD because they have an HDTV when they really have SD content being driven over RF to that HDTV

One thing I’m curious about, since you are an apparently happy with your Series3, were you not using features like TTG or MRV? Or were those features simply not as important to you as HD? Obviously TiVo has a better, more refined and more stable interface but is seems like feature wise the Series3 isn’t a lot better than the DVRs your cable/satellite company offers for a whole lot less money.

Yes, there is a need to encode 1080i. For one, I would not buy a box that only did 720p, period. I know I’m not alone in that. There are channels that I watch that are in 1080i, they need to be recorded. Actually, I think I watch more 1080i content than 720p. And I have a 1080p set, and I’d want as much 1080i content to best take advantage of it as I can get.

I don’t know the precise amount of any fees, but from conversations with people in the industry, they aren’t very large. It’d never cover the costs of analog encoders.

On top of that, I love the S3 – and I simply would not buy a box that did component input only. Period. Some of the reasons I was willing to pay for an S3 were to NOT have to have a cable STB, to NOT have to deal with IR blasters, and to NOT have to accept quality loss. Take those away and the S3 would not be worth the price, not even at $400. If it isn’t dual-tuner with direct digital recording for maximum quality, it is not worth it. Especially when you’d still have to rent an HD cable box – two if it even tried to be dual-tuner – and deal with the clutter, IR blasters (double the fun if you tried to control two boxes), etc. More hassle, more cost, and lower quality. Not compelling.

TiVo’s CEO said all of their future boxes will be CableCARD, that’s the direction the market is going (in the US at least). Maybe some day they’ll have another satellite offering, but it doesn’t look like it will be any time soon.

Also there is no need to encode 1080i, 720p is the more common HTDV format in use and is a bit more bandwidth friendly.

As for a low-price S3, I would think they would drop the dual-cable card support. Even with just the internal QAM decoders and one cable card slot filled with a single stream card, I’d be perfectly happy most of the time. Sort of like the “Dual Tuner” model I have now, just for digital. And when multi-stream cards come out (they’re past certification at cable labs now from what I’ve seen on the web), even this restriction would go away.

They need to comment soon about multiroom (and TTG) support and maybe OCAP so that we don’t all feel like the S3’s we buy will become non-functional once switched digital deploys…

Technologically can an analog HD component stream be captured and compressed in real-time? Yes.

Can be be done in hardware economical enough for consumers? Not yet.

The Slingbox Pro can accept 1080i HD component input – but it isn’t encoding HD. It down-samples to SD first, the encoded output is 640×480. It is very *nice* SD, but still SD.

Being able to compress 1080i in real-time means handling 6.75 times the volume of data needed to compress SD in real-time. You need much more powerful hardware than found in any TiVo, or any DVR for that matter, today. Hardware that would cost a lot more than the hardware in the S3 – meaning the cost of the box would be more, and the S3 is already too expensive.

You have to look at it this way – how many people will be willing to spend more on a box that is going to give them one tuner, lower quality video, and still require them to have a full receiver and deal with the IR blasters, etc?

It doesn’t make sense for TiVo to develop such a box unless they can sell enough of them to make money doing so. We’ve already seen that boxes priced like the S3 don’t exactly fly off the shelves, imagine a box in the S3’s price-range that had all the disadvantages of an S2 (IR blasters, external receiver), and produced lower quality images than the other options. I don’t see that as a hot seller.

And engineering resources are finite. Why should TiVo devote resources to that project when they have Comcast and Cox paying them to work on OCAP, Cablevision Mexico paying them to work on a version for them, and now Seven Network paying them to do the engineering for DVB-T systems. The payoff from those projects can be huge, and there is low cost to TiVo since the partners are fronting development money.

DirecTV and Dish Network are actively antagonistic toward outside vendors now. The only real hope is that TiVo wins on appeal and/or Liberty Media decides switch DirecTV back to TiVo once they take over from News Corp. (Liberty Media is a major investor in TiVo.)

Or, in time the costs of hardware that can do real-time analog HD capture will come down and maybe it’ll make such a box economically feasible.