Starchoice 505 ==component== Hauppauge HD dongle ==USB== Mac + EyeTV == WiFi== AppleTV, iPhone…

(Sorry for the crappy formatting — the site ate all my greater thans / less thans…)

Exactly. Here in Toronto, I’m living under the gulag-like conditions offered by Rogers Cable’s SA 8300HD DVR running SARA software, possibly the most primitive DVR in North America — at least it feels that way. As longtime TiVo lovers, my husband and I felt great sadness when the allure of HD on a 46″ set made SD unwatchable, and we regretfully had to abandon our faithful old Series 1 for the Rogers HD DVR.

Since then, our lives have been filled with single-day, single-initial so-called “Search” that forces us to scroll through 267 instances of “News” on our way to “Nightline”; a dog’s breakfast-like Scheduled Recordings list which intermixes actual to-do items and orphaned no-record entries; and generally, more quirks and flaws than you could shake a stick at. OTA recording with TiVoHD is not an option due to Tribune Media’s current lack of guide data for Canadian HD channels, no specialty channels, and occasional signal errors.

As a result, I keep waiting for the day when TiVo finally releases an HD model with component inputs, at which point the Rogers DVR will immediately get the boot and we’ll be back in the powerful, happy land of TiVo. Unfortunately, it seems that we’ll have to be patient for a long, long while. After CableCard, TiVo’s next step is DVB-T for Australia and most of the world — a step in the right (CableCard-less) direction, but your article clearly shows that models able to record from an external cable/satellite box will be a long time coming.

Let’s just pray that costs come down faster than expected.