PVRblog: "TiVo Versus Media Center"

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://ericgharrison.com/Blog/archive/2004/06/24/260.aspx' target='_blank'>http://ericgharrison.com/Blog/archive/2004/06/24/260.aspx</a><br /><br /></div><i>"A couple recent notable comparison tests between a Microsoft Media Center Edition PC and a standalone TiVo have been making the rounds: TiVo versus Media Center Edition PC's - finally! and Media Center Eye for the TiVo Guy. In both sets of tests, the Media Center Edition PCs prove to be a bit buggy and crash-prone, and the reviewers eventually give the final nods to TiVo with its bulletproof simple design and reliability."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/gateway-media.jpg" /><br /><br />Ahh, good reading for several people I know in the market for a DVR. :)

[Crocuta]

I think these two quotes pretty much sum it up.

About Tivo...
at the core, it's still a Linux based box running on minimal hardware with a user interface that pretty much anyone can figure out.

That's what something like this should be. My wife should not have to be a computer programmer to record or watch a show. Tivo does exactly what it should and is totally reliable in doing it. I can count on it.

About the MCE PC...
At random the machine would become unresponsive, or we would have problem with sound. After much trial and error, we found that rather than muting the sound when we turned the TV off, we could just turn the volume all the way down and that improved reliability.

The system would still however act strange on occasion, so we continued experimenting. In the end we figured out that if we turned off 'live TV' by stopping it before we shut off the display, we solved most of the stability problems.

Yeah, this is just what I want from an entertainment device... have to coax it into working by learning little tricks and workarounds and by spending hours of my time on Internet forums where people can tell me how to bypass all of the bugs in the system. Sure, I get the appeal of this all-in-one multimedia entertainment system, but I will not allow my entertainment devices to fall to the level of unreliability that we have come to expect from PCs.

Give me Tivo any time! It's simple, it's reliable... it just works.