By way of the TiVo Community and whispers on the wind, we learn that TiVo intends to launch a new, higher-end DVR at CEDIA early next month… despite laying off their in-house industrial design hardware team. As to what comes after Roamio Plus and Pro, one can only guess. Assuming TiVo even sticks with the cutesy moniker for the custom install crowd, they’ve previously appended both Elite and XL to higher capacity models. First and foremost, that’s exactly what we expecting here. Whereas the Roamio Pro tops out at 3TB, I have reason to believe this incoming model will provide significantly more recording capacity, although it’s not entirely clear if this is accomplished via a single 4-6TB drive OR multiple drives working in concert for outrageous amounts of storage.
Beyond the hard drive bump, might we see 6 more tuners, powered by a second CableCARD, to take on the ridiculous? Signs point to no, but perhaps there are other surprises in store. I know I still miss that old Series 3 OLED display – it just oozed orange coolness (assuming your DVR wasn’t in a cabinet). Not to mention, maybe TiVo’s top unit should ship with learning Slide remote. And we wonder if it’s still too early for 4k. Guess we’ll find out in a few short weeks… What’s on your hardware wishlist?
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Signs point to insane amounts of storage... along with matching insane pricing. But we are talking the custom install crowd here. If TiVo does go the media server route, might they let us move our personal video and photo collections onto the DVR and provide a means to move it around the house (or beyond)? Also, if we're going with multiple drives, I imagine we'd need a larger, different enclosure. Would they make it a it rack mountable and RAID like SnapStream? Hm.
Wonder if we'll see something running on Pace hardware or similar, given the personnel transition.
The Roamio line for me really gave me what I was looking for from TiVo hardware wise finally. A 12 tuner would be crazy, but I would rather have 2 Pros for backup in case one fails or reboots in the middle of a recording as some have seen recently.
My wishlist is still software related. I want Plex functionality so I can stream any locally stored content and have TiVo handle it as well as TiVo handles TiVo to TiVo streaming including the trickplay functionality. I would love to be able to offload using the built in Stream functionality to transcode the raw Mpeg2 to something more reasonable size wise that would still look great on a TV. I want built in Trakt.TV functionality so I can track what episodes I have watched and also the ability to tell TiVo never to record those specific episodes even if I have record repeats on. I would love all of this to be wrapped in a new TiVo Desktop.
Isn't the current Pro 3TB? Could this be as simple as a 4TB option?