tomeppy.com

With our upcoming move, many decisions have to be made (warning: the contents of this blog entry will be meaningless to 99% of the people who look at this site. This is one big rant, and should be ignored at all costs).

I have been toying with the idea of dumping our beloved Tivo in favor a new Windows Media Center PC for some time now. The new version of MCE is pretty sweet looking, and has a ton of bells and whistles. What nearly put it over the top was the idea of using my Xbox as a “Media Center Extender,??? which meant that the big ugly PC didn’t have to be hooked up to the TV.

This idea was slowly taking over my brain, until I visted my coustin David’s house earlier this month. For the first time, I saw HDTV in person. And there was much rejoicing.

I started seriously looking at HDTV support for my next DVR device, and quickly learned of the MCE’s shortcomings on this front. In fact, Thomas Hawk has a great review of MCE 2005, where he pretty much pans the whole thing as a result of the HDTV issue.

So I was back to square one, until last Thursday. That’s when I read an article on Engadget entitled “Comcast declaring war on TiVo with the Motorola 6412.??? Could this be the answer? A Digital Cable box with two tuners (just like my existing Tivo), the ability to record HDTV, do 60 hours of recorded TV and cost only $5 per month!?!

I immediately went to the Comcast website, but their commitment to maintaning one of the worst websites in history kept me from getting any real information.

On the day after Christmas, with my wife stuck in bed because of a sore back, I did what any caring husband would do… I went to Best Buy. They had demo units for both Comcast and DirecTV setup, so I asked some questions and did some looking.

The bottom line is that the monthly fee for Comcast is a little more than DirecTV, but I don’t have to buy any additional hardware to get HDTV support. With DirecTV, I have to buy a $300 decorder and then still pay an additional monthly fee. And then I also have to get an HDTV antenna to get local channel HDTV broadcast’s. Lame.

So what I think I am going to end up doing, is going back to Comcast. I get a DVR with dual tuners and the ability to record HDTV, plus more HDTV channels than DirecTV. I really hate the idea of “feeding the pig,??? but until DirecTV or Dish Networks get their act together with regards to HDTV and Tivo, I don’t see any other option for what I want to do.

It also doesn’t hurt that if I want to play around with MCE 2005 on my own, I don’t have to buy extra DirecTV receivers to decode the signal for the extra tuners on that computer.

See, I told you that you wouldn’t care about this!