Megazone’s been quizzing the TiVo folks all day and has tons of details on the forthcoming Series 3. Well, except for a concrete date (mid-late 2006) and price. All in all, exciting news if TiVo delivers.
megazone says: The unit has two CableCARD slots on the back and it will support Multi-Stream (CableCARD 2.0) or Single-Stream (CableCARD 1.0) cards. If you have multi-stream then you only need one card, but as long as only single stream cards are available you can use two of them. Yes, it supports digital and analog cable, digital ATSC OTA, and analog NTSC OTA. The unit has front panel controls clustered on the right, and a nice display in the middle with a very cool feature – it displays the title of the show(s) tuned at the time, so you always know what it is recording at a glance. The remote ls also sleeker – a slick update of the Series2 peanut with minor changes for HDTV (such as an aspect button). But the big change is that the remote is backlit! TiVo will also be selling an external SATA drive for easy storage expansion, and they have that on display here too.
Photos provided by megazone…
Series 3 Front View
Series 3 Front Panel
Series 3 Rear Panel
Series 3 Rear View
TiVo Series 3 Backlit Remote
External SATA Hard Drive
View Comments
If Megazone is looking in, here are my top questions I wish you could find out:
1) Will all of the MCE content that Gates announced that can be downloaded to an MCE also be transferable to the Tivo3? (Akimbo, ABC, MTV, StarZ)?
2)if MCE can be loaded onto any old home computer and used simply as a gateway, will HME apps be able to facilitate buying and automagically transfering such content to the Tivo? If not, will TIvo add such features to the "MCE plugin?"
3) What is the Mpeg4 decoder in the Tivo3? Is the Mpeg2 encoder any more powerful than that in the SA2?
4) What is the estimated transfer time for an hourlong SD show from Tivo3 to a PC using a wired 1000Mbit connection? About the same as what it would be for an SA2, or we talking several orders of magnitude difference?
I have those same questions. Especially on HME and TTG performance.
I've redistributed all of MegaZone's pictures with his permission.
http://www.tivoblog.com/archives/2006/01/05/tivo-pictures-from-ces-taken-by-megazone/