Humax DVD Burner with TiVo and MCE 2k5

Michael Gartenberg | November 01, 2004, 08:45 AM

So, for the last week I’ve been working out of the house while I recover from the surgery. Since I couldn’t drive, or lift anything it was a good time to get some work done looking at some of the things that have shown up in recent weeks. One of those was the new Humax DVD Recorder with TiVo. You might not have heard of Humax yet, but they’re going to make a big splash in the US with this product. The unit combines a DVD recorder, a HD capable of 80 hours of recorded content (at lowest quality, of course) and the TiVo service. The combination is excellent and it retails for $399, which is a about a third of what you’d pay for competing units from other folks. TiVo service, is of course extra. The unit has nice features and hooked up to the component video inputs on my TV with no issue. While TiVo works off of a home network, oddly you must connect it to a phone line first before you can get it on you net. Not a big deal for me but there are lots of folks with home networks, VoIP phones and no landline, might be an issue for them. Once the configuration set up, I popped in a USB wireless adapter, it found the network and everything just worked (that is after I let it sit for four hours to process the information, another TiVo feature that I don’t love). The Home Media option worked well. It found the other TiVo in the house and was able to copy shows between devices and I could even watch the show as it copied (but couldn’t skip around the program until it fully copied which takes a while). After a few software downloads, I could stream to pictures and music from my PC and Macintosh. Of the two, the Apple experience is by far the better one. I could publish and see my iTunes Playlists, Albums, Genres, Artists (but could not play protected AAC files). Windows limited me to publishing folders of music. That’s it. No playlsits, genres, artitsts… nothing. They suggest I download and pay for something called mood logic but I think I’ll just use a Mac.

Overall, the experience is great. It’s simple, easy to use. Let’s you archive shows to DVD, copy them to other TiVos and later this year, copy them to your PC. Music and Picture streaming worked well (with the Macintosh experience being much better).

How does this compare to MCE 2k5? Well, for portability, MCE is a no brainer. I can copy to my PC today and sync to portable devices like my PMC, Smartphone and PDA as well as burn to DVD. Add a Media Center Extender and you can stream all the content all over your home (although I don’t have a final Extender or Xbox Extender to see how well that works, the beta stuff I used worked pretty well but needed a sub 802.11a network to function and there were issues with range and stability that might or moght not have been fixed). The EPG on MCE 2k5 I think is better than TiVos I was able to find movies by when they were on, by star listing, and other ways. TiVo mostly limits you to alphabetical listings. Tricker things like telling it to record a certain show at a certain time of day and only at that time of day and only if that show is one is easier with MCE. As for HD, it’s no contest. MCE supports over the air HD (if you add in an HD tuner card, I don’t have one, so I can’t tell you how well it works or not) and no TiVo does (with the exception of a $1,000 unit from DirectTV, but that unit only holds 30 hours of HD content, doesn’t have TiVo’s network features and can’t burn to DVD). Likewise, MCE 2k5 can support up to three tuners (although only one box from HP ships natively with two) and that can make a difference, especially when the networks start doing strange things to their TV times to mess up DVR users.

So which is the better solution? By the time you add up the numbers, if you look at the cost of no-name MCE system and an Extender vs. a Humax DVD Recorder with TiVo and a second TiVo box and the PC or Mac to keep your music and pictures on your probably talking prices that are pretty similar. Granted, you could also just go with one box and keep it even simpler or lower. A lot will depend on what your usage model is. Do you just want to record TV shows? Do you have pictures or music that you want to stream around the house? How important is portability and is the ability to burn to DVD portability enough? The TiVo based solution are in my opinion somewhat simpler to set up and maintain. There are no service packs to install and there’s no Windows desktop to shell out to. The additional complexity of MCE comes with the added fact that it’s a far more flexible platform. I can leverage the 10 foot UI to the max. I can purchase music from online services, (and if I have an HP MediaCenter, even use iTunes from 10 foot UI), Read RSS feeds, burn to DVD, create CDs, View pictures and video natively, and sync all that content to plethora of mobile devices from the PC, PMC, PDA and SmartPhone.

Both platforms deliver a rich and powerful set of technologies that leverage broadband services, home networks and mobility and allow for scenarios that were in the realm of the pure geek alone just a few short years ago that are now simple enough for mainstream users to set up and use effectively. The real question that both platforms will have is evangelizing customers on these features getting them to pay for them over cheap services from cable and satellite companies.. As I’ve said before, it’s hard to get folks to pay for first class when they don’t know it exists or worse, when they’re sitting in coach and think they are in first class.