Sifry's Alerts

try tivo-to-go instead of dvd dave, you can select everything you want to transfer to your laptop and it'll queue it up...

i do what i want overnight and its ready to go for my commute in the morning...

if you have the 802.11g wireless adapters connected to the tivo (and your laptop) the transfer usually takes less time than the original program...

your kids can still select and play whatever original episode they want - over and over ;)

You're transferring things to tape? Why not transfer to your computer and burn DVD's?

If you have a Tivo Series 2, it's network capable. Connect it to your home network then you can use Tivo To Go (http://www.tivo.com/4.9.4.1.asp) and you can move those recordings to any PC on the network. Then you can watch them right off the PC Hard Drive, no need for a burn to DVD. If you still want a DVD, then have the PC group and burn them using something like MyDVD from Sonic Solutions (http://snipurl.com/x4be).

If you don't have a Series 2, but one of those DTV Tivo's all bets are off. DTV has the network capability in the box, but for some reason (they don't want to customer support calls is my guess) they don't enable it.

Dan

MythTV has this function... you basically build playlists, and it will play shows back-to-back as you'd like. And since MythTV also has auto-commerical skipping, when you make the tape it won't have any commercials either.

I have two tivo's sitting in the corner after messing with MythTV.

Of course, you could just get yourself a Topfield TF5800 PVR instead... though I'm not sure if it's available in the USA at the moment? (tried to Google it http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=topfield+5800+usa and only came up with my blog posts on it and other UK stuff!) You can set up playlists on a Toppy and record to DVD, see e.g. http://forum.toppy.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=56583#56623

And with the ability to write little programs for it called TAPs http://www.toppy.org.uk/forum/glossary.php#t it's a techie's dream, though it has its quirks. I'm on my 2nd Toppy with bigger hard drive, and no they're not paying me to promote them, I wish!

Admittedly, it takes a LOT more time and effort, but what I've been doing is using TiVo Desktop to copy the video off the TiVo onto my PC. Then, I use some black magic to convert it to MPEG2, run it through a video editor to clip out all the commercials, then create a DVD menu of all the video and then burn it to a DVD for the kids.

So, I've got these nice DVD's with on-screen menus, no commercials ... but, it did take more time. Processing eight 30-minute episodes (4 hours of video reduced to about 2.5 hours worth of video after removing all the commercials) takes about 4 hours of labor to process and about another 2-3 hours to encode and burn the DVD.

The best way is to save it on hard drive, it hardly takes time compared to recording on a vcr, i think doing that is really outdated now.