No, this posting has nothing to do with the immortal rockers who paint themselves up and delude themselves into thinking they’re still cool. This is the other KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid.
This weekend we bought a TiVo for Lisa’s parents. The SD-H400 was our TiVo of choice because it packs a DVD player to go along with the TiVo (her parents needed a new DVD player, their old one won’t play burned DVDs). Some cool things about the SD-H400:
- As I already mentioned, it has a DVD player. You can watch a DVD while you’re recording something on the TiVo.
- It’s a TiVo. If you own one you already understand what I’m saying. If you don’t own one, you need to get one.
- It comes with TiVo Basic.
- It’s a Series 2 TiVo and comes with all the related network-driven goodness.
TiVo Basic is essentially the TiVo service without the recurring monthly bill. The downside is you only get 3 days of guide data (compared to 12 on TiVo Plus) and you don’t get Season Pass. While some people may say why bother if you don’t get Season Pass, we were getting this for Lisa’s parents and didn’t know if they’d even like the TiVo. So having TiVo Basic as an option meant no need to commit to the service. It also meant we could give it to her parents and it would be functional without US having to pay the service.
Series 2 is a huge deal. It’s the reason I won’t buy the HD DirecTiVo, which is only a Series 1. Series 2 means you can hook your TiVo up to your home network using a USB ethernet or 802.11b adapter. Using your home network connection means no more using a phone line to download guide data or software updates. This is huge because: 1) who likes having their phone line tied up and 2) many people don’t have phone jacks behind their televisions.
So we went to BestBuy on Saturday and bought the SD-H400 and the Linksys WUSB11 wireless network adapter (it’s the one recommended by TiVo). I brought it back to our house, cracked it open and connected it to my Dell flat panel monitor (did I mention it’s the best monitor…EVER?) and phone line. I went through the setup, guessing in some places what her parents environment would be like and quickly got it to connect to TiVo over the phone line. This is important because the SD-H400 ships with an older version of the TiVo software that doesn’t support wireless network adapters. A quick update from TiVo and I had the new update. I cracked open the WUSB11 and pointed it at my wireless network. Within moments it had pulled a guide data update over my broadband connection. Everything was working very well.
Sunday I had to go back to BestBuy to pick out a wireless access point for her parents (can’t do much with just the adapter, after all). I settled on the WAP11, it was cheap, workable and could plug into their existing network with no changes. I brought the WAP11 back to my house, plugged it into my network and configured all of it’s security settings. Then I set up the TiVo to connect using it instead of my access point. Perfect, worked without a hitch.
So we packed the TiVo and wireless gadgets back into a box, wrapped them and delivered them to her parents. I had everything back out of the box and hooked up in about 15 minutes. A couple of tweaks here and there (their environment was slightly different than what I had imagined when I first set up the TiVo at my house). Within another 5 minutes we were recording the Olympics, pausing, rewinding and playing burned DVD’s. I was absolutely shocked at how dead simple it was to set the thing up. More impressively, there were at least half a dozen little places where the setup could have hit a snag and didn’t. God bless TiVo for making such a wonderfully designed product.
So now there’s a problem. Lisa’s parents have TiVo and we don’t. I may have to put aside my desire to wait for a good HD TiVo to come out and just settle on a SD TiVo.