Last night my wife and I had a brief discussion. Didn't take long to reach a final decision.
Today I canceled TiVo service. We're now relying solely on our PC PVR solution. My wife and I have been real fans of TiVo for several years, and we have been spreading the good news ever since. Quite a few people got one because of us.
Finally TiVo had to go, but it's not BTV that has replaced it. Beyond TV and Beyond Media are gone as well.
Here are the top three reasons:
1. I wanted to get at least another year, maybe two years out of my server. BTV wouldn't allow smooth timeshifting for anything recording with a quality higher than 'Good'. Now I can.
2. The BTV UI is unbearably slow sometimes, sluggish. I would have to make sure not to keep too many shows around, otherwise it would get worse. Not a problem anymore. I could even use 3d accelerated. Amazing how fast a transparent epg can be.
3. BTV requires use of web admin which clearly is a sub-par piece of software. Now I have administration in one UI.
BTV has serious architectural issues. Some of them are at display when you use the webadmin.
I have been running Beta versions of BTV for a year now. And I don't like what I have been seeing. Let alone the design of what might be coming up.
Your mileage does vary, of course. If you need those WMV's. Not sure if Sage can do those via 'job'. There are a few other things BTV only can do.
None of them we have use for.
EDIT: Did some testing. Now I can easily go as high as 7 Mbps for a DVD strream VBR (probably higher) while timeshifting and do full administration in transparency mode without any hickup. Here is (should be) something about webservices:
http://science.slashdot.org/article....tid=146&tid=14