Be Excellent To Each Other

As a Virgin customer and general lover of gadgets and whatnot, I'm very excited about this and have been following it for some time.

The 1TB box is out any minute I believe, but frankly the price is way too much for me personally (about £150), though I'm sure these things will drop over time as everything does.

Anyway, they have now announced an identical box but with half the storage space, due in May, and for a much more excellent £50 fee.

Any other Virgins on here?

Why is this a TiVo box? How does it differ from the standard box you get with Virgin or Sky, just size of disk?

I'm assuming it's not just a branding exercise, and actually has proper TiVo in the box?

I miss my TiVo, 10 years on and it is still the best pvr by a country mile, even the crippled version 1 box we had in the uk. People raving about "season pass" on the sky box when it came out were deluded fools...

Yes.

Linky.

If I had virgin here, and hadn't found the joy of sick beard and usenet, I would be all over that shit.

For anyone who hasn't tried a TiVo box, it really is the dogs nuts when it comes to pvrs

Yeah, I don't deny I am stupidly excited about it!

Hmm. I hope they have Virgin Media in York. Did I mention I'm moving to York?

York.

Jorvik.

I would probably have been all over that if we were still in the UK. I thought the V+ box was pretty good - it upscaled things nicely and had a could record two channels and display another, but it was spoilt a little by a clunky UI. The virgin media streaming (films on demand, catch up telly etc etc) worked really quite well.

I've never used TiVo, though, and am not really sure what else it offers over the existing services, but am a sucker for new services like that. And a bigger HDD woul've been great, Lady T is always filling it up with junk series link recordings that never get watched.



Last time I went to the Jorvik centre (about 4 years ago) I was quite disappointed. It seemed like they'd scrapped a lot of the interesting exhibits and instead focused mainly on a gay ride through some shitty recreated village with mannequins dressed up as vikings. Shame, as when I went as a youngster I remembered it being quite good - maybe I misremember though, but seeing preserved remains was better than a rebuilt model to me (having both would've been really nice).

It's all in the wishlists.

Say I liked top gear, I could setup a wish list for top gear new episodes, and regardless of what channel or when they are on, it will record the new episodes for you. That wish list is active forever, so it will pick up the new season automatically.
I can do that for all episodes if I like, not just new ones.
I can also do that for an actor, or director, of genre. I.e I like Scarlett Johansson, I can setup a wish list for her and it will download any film that is shown that stars her, or I can set it up for any film or tv show that has her in it, she has directed or is about her, were I a true stalker.

Timing clashes? No problem, if you don't have a tuner free, it will look at the two shows, look to see if any are repeated, and if they are, record the repeat of one of them...

And after all that, the TiVo will remember the type of stuff you seem to like watching, and it will fill up it's hard disk with similar shows, ready for you to try if you want...

Sky and their season pass? Whoop de fucking do...

I hate the 'similar shows' idea. So I like House, does that mean I'd like Grey's Anatomy? No.

Other than that, there's nothing Tivo does that Media Center hasn't been doing for years. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Microsoft would make a mint with some MCE set top boxes.

You don't have to watch the similar shows, you know I found it useful.

And sure, MCE does similar stuff, but that is because they took it from Tivo! Tivo have been doing this for over 10 years...

Ok, I admit it, it's the remote. It's the damn thumbs up icon. It's the damn colourful cheerfulness of it all. I like my interfaces free of cuteness.

/grump

I kicked Sky to the curb last year and moved to Virgin's TV service...it's OK, nothing more. I doubt I'd pay anything to move from the existing V+ HD box to the Tivo one.

I got mine installed today. I rather like it.
Due to Mrs Grim...'s inability to cancel Sky, we can now record nine different shows at once

I have had it a while and still do not use it properly... but it is great.

I still haven't got one yet but intend to in the next couple of months. To be honest I'd left it on purpose as from what I read about it, there were some issues with the software for the first few months, though I guess that's always the way with these things at first.

I'd say that 95% of the software faults are gone now. Also functionality has increased, so default settings for recordings include decent overlap, rather than having to do bespoke adjustments.

However, the F1 channel is still unconfirmed. Virgin say that they are desperately trying to get it, but runour has it that Sky are holding out to give some differentiation between the two. This upsets me, as we're not allowed to attach sky dishes to our building anymore, even if I wanted to change.

Sky won't want any announcements on it until very much closer to the time, mainly to allow enough Virgin/BT subscribers to move over. If they announce it now, Sky lose potential customers.

It's in their best interests to keep any news buried for as long as possible.

This is true. Also, the first race is on BBC, so they can let it slip even longer.

Interesting comments on Digital Spy with optmistic Virgin customers saying that Sky is at Ecclestones mercy and will have to allow Virgin to have access, otherwise less viewers will piss off Bernie. I'd wager that in Media Mogul top trumps, Murdoch has the edge in each of those categories. In particular, height.

You sure? Last I saw sky had the first two races.

My mistake. At the end of the last race, Jake said 'We'll be in Australia for the first race' but obviously didn't clarify what that meant

Sky are showing all of them live AFAIK, it's just they are sharing half of them with the beeb.

Malc

Taken from http://f1.sky.com/#f1-coverage

Malc

That suggests they're not showing F1 for non-HD customers?

I believe that on Sky, you have to have either the sports or the HD package to get it.

So any news on if Virgin customers will get it?

No, for reasons we discussed a few posts ago.

How about now?

I didn't see anything other then speculation. Anyway I'll add to it as I've found a tantalising bit of news.

"Sky Sports #F1 to launch on @smallworldcable in March. More details to follow in January” Awesome news!! hopefully in HD too!" - 28 Dec 11 off of Twitter via Digital Spy

They appear to be a small Virgin type company offering the same services but only in Ayrshire, Carlisle, Lancaster and Morecambe.

Finally taken the plunge and ordered my Tivo box. Earliest they could install was mid-Feb, but that's fine.

I'm glad I waited as the costs are cheaper now.

Are they? Bums.

Oh, well I mostly meant cheaper than when it launched last summer. I think you just got yours last month? I don't think it's been reduced in that time.

Oh, right

I've not got used to the slight delay as it (presumably) loads things from the Internet, but I like having Spotify on the TV and it's doing a good job of recording things for me.

I've had their V+ box for about 18 months and that's been flawless for me and I've never had any problems - I would have stuck with it only it's got a relatively tiny hard drive, so I just feel the time is right to finally upgrade.

It took a month for mine to be fitted. Did you negotiate a better contract? We got an £11 a month reduction including the Tivo Monthly fee.

I got a free box for the bedroom.
I'm also sure I got free installation, but that's been put on this month's bill (£100). I will phone them at some point today.

Virgin Billing sucks.. They have owed me £30 since September, they say they are finally refunding it.

I had a faulty modem, which they replaced with a superhub.... and they charged me £60 for it. It is now being refunded.

I try my very best to interact with Virgin Media as little as possible. This has worked out fine for us so far.

Yes when it works it is great....

To be honest I just booked it online so I should be charged £49.95.

I got an email from them yesterday to say they're installing this Friday - they were supposed to come in February but it seems daft to cancel if they're offering this week, so I'll go with that.

I suppose, but If you can save £11 a month it would pay for the box twice.

Worth giving them a call..

In slightly separate news... fasterererererer internet from Virgin.... free:

[/quote]
So, so unnecessary.

Woo Hoo!!! 60Mbps!

Bet it's still dog slow from 6-9pm.

So, so unnecessary.[/quote]
Yep. I was already going to revisit my package in June to see if it saves money to downgrade my internet speed. However due to their packaging, last year it would have cost £2 a month extra. However, a double downgrade may be in order.

When is this from?

We're living in the future man!

...Totally agree TBH! I barley ever get close to downloading anything past 20mbps. Only ISO's from M$ download anywhere near my max rate. Although it's kind of nice to mention to the Yanks that their office speed is a faction of my home connection.

Yeah!


And we're back in 2005