Thanks to my friend Jer for the heads up on this great deal. Buy.com is selling the TiVo-approved Western Digital 500GB My DVR Expander eSATA External Hard Drive for just $131.99 - and that’s with free shipping. That’s a great deal, Buy.com has the list price as $179.99 and TiVo.com still lists them for the old $199.99 MSRP. This is the only eSATA drive officially sanctioned by TiVo for use with the TiVo Series3 and the TiVo HD. I’ve had one connected to my Series3 for quite a while and it works great.

EDIT: Reader Mike Turpin points out that you can get the same deal through Amazon.com from the seller BuyNow Incorporated (see the ‘More Buying Choices’ on the right) and avoid the sales tax Buy.com charges in several states. BuyNow Incorporated is really Buy.com, so it is the same deal, without tax for those who would be charged from Buy.com. Thanks Mike!

Thanks to Darren over at EngadgetHD, who noticed that what everyone’s suspected would occur seems to have come to pass. TiVo has quietly removed the Series3, the company’s original HD DVR, from its offerings. Both new and refurbished product listings now include only the dual-tuner, standard-definition TiVo Series2DT, and the dual-tuner, high-definition TiVo HD.

TiVo has said that they’d be focusing further development on the TiVo HD platform architecture, so this comes as little surprise. In fact, we’ve talked about it here before. It’s a shame, though, for those looking for the premium experience offered only by the Series3, with its THX certification, fancier remote, and front-panel OLED display, not to mention larger hard drive.

Before long, we’d hope to see the stock TiVo HD kicked up a notch with its own larger hard drive; as more and more of what people watch shifts to HD channels, a twenty-hour capacity for HD recordings will seem stingier and stingier. Western Digital’s My DVR Expander external hard drive helps, and expansion kits and services from third parties like DVRUpgrade and WeaKnees are great for those who don’t mind modified hardware, but simply put, the average consumer wants to buy a standard product that’s all he or she needs.

So, as we wistfully recall the dear, departed TiVo Series3 (and as aficionados scramble to find remaining stock on store shelves or from DVRUpgrade and other online vendors with small stocks), we look forward to future configurations of the new flagship product, the TiVo HD.

Over at Blogcritics, Barbara Barnett has published a Technology Review of her experience using a TiVo Series3 for the past several months. She’d upgraded from the Comcast cable DVR, and as she says: I will never, ever look back. I’ve been “TiVo’d.”

She highlights the features of TiVo that have made her, as a non-geek user, a TiVo convert, such as the Season Pass, the advanced search capabilities of WishLists, the Thumb Ratings and TiVo Suggestions. All of the features usually touted as making a TiVo more than just a standard DVR. She also highlights the more advanced features added by connecting the TiVo to a network, but also prosaic things like being able to undelete a program, which while simple is something most DVRs don’t provide.

It is nice to see a blog from a non-geek user about that features they really use, and why they love their TiVo. It is a chance of pace from the usual parade of geeks - myself included.

As I reported earlier, TiVo is launching YouTube support on Series3 and TiVo HD units with the new 9.4 software revision today. Now they’ve put out an official press release confirming the launch.

When I reported on the release of the 9.4 software for the TiVo Series3 & TiVo HD on Tuesday, I speculated on whether the update also included the promised YouTube support. Well, that question has been answered - it is in there, and Dave Zatz got a look at it and to keep things circular, he posted a video of it to YouTube. Since this was only announced on March 12, 2008 it is nice to see it coming out so soon.

9.4 enables native H.264 decoding on the S3 & HD, required for YouTube support. What is not known is if there decoding support has been extended to other areas as well, such as video podcasts. If so, it could eliminate transcoding on a PC via TiVo Web Video, at least for video podcasts in H.264 - which is many, if not most, of them. I’m hoping the H.264 support does apply to other video sources, it would make life much easier. TiVo Web Video is OK, but not ideal.

Speaking of, allow me a small digression…

I realize I never did pull together a review of TiVo Desktop 2.6 as I’d said I would. I’ve been pretty busy and it got away from me. And, honestly, I’ve had so many problems with it that each time I think about writing it up I just get upset again. I recently had TiVo Web Video forget all of the podcasts I’d subscribed to, twice in two days! I noticed it wasn’t transferring anything after a couple of days, and when I checked the config file it was back to default - all the subscriptions gone. So I restored them and it started transferring again, so I went to bed. The next day it had stopped, and the file was wiped out, again! I wiped everything and started from scratch and it has been working for over a week now. And this isn’t the first time this happened, early on it lost all the subscriptions too. Of course, since TiVo Web Video, unlike TiVoCast, doesn’t just start with the most recent recording and move forward, but insists on downloading and transcoding back episodes as well (default is 5), it would re-download and re-transfer everything. It literally takes a few days for my PC to suck down all the backlog (I subscribe to a number of podcasts) and transfer it. So when this happens it is a major pain in the posterior.

And it doesn’t clean up after itself, I found over ten gigabytes of abandoned downloaded recordings sitting the the Downloads directory. Recordings it should’ve deleted after transferring to the TiVo. It just slowly uses up the drive. The leaking seems to vary - right now there are two files from back on 7/8 totally about 50MB. But all it takes is a few long-form HD podcasts to be missed and it adds up fast. Those are just a couple of the problems with it. Don’t get me wrong, having it is better than not having it at all, but it is far from a stable solution, let alone ideal. But I digress, I really should make myself write up all the issues and such.

Back to the topic at hand..,

So anyway, I would really love to see TiVo allow the S3/HD to download H.264 podcasts directly, bypassing the PC. Heck, as an interim even if they downloaded to the PC but skipped transcoding and just transferred to the TiVo as-is it would speed things up a great deal. Transcoding really slows things down.

Dave got a look at what is apparently a pre-release version of the software, so the final release could vary, but probably won’t. YouTube is added as another option under the TiVo Central -> Find Programs & Downloads -> Download TV, Movies, & Web Video menu item. It looks like the screen has been retitled from ‘Video Downloads’ to ‘Broadband Video’, which may be a reflection of the fact that TiVo is now streaming video and not just downloading it. The ‘Movies & TiVo from Amazon Unbox’ link has been changed to ‘Amazon Unbox TV & Movies’, which I think sounds better. And just below that, slotting in above ‘Brows Other Videos’ is a new link entitled, simply, ‘YouTube’.

The only sub-option at this time is ‘Watch YouTube Videos’, and once you select that you get into the YouTube HME application interface proper. The color scheme reminds me of the current Music Choice application. Within the application you can select Featured Videos, Most Recent, Search, Top Favorites, Most Viewed, or Top Rated. Each selection then has sub-selections. The interface looks pretty good, and you can even rate the videos 1-5 stars, just as you can online.

From Dave’s video I don’t see a way to link this application with your YouTube account, which would be nice. I’d like to be able to pull up the subscriptions I have on YouTube from my TiVo. And to have ratings from one location be reflected in the other. Being able to subscribe or favorite a video on the TiVo and having it show up online would be nice. But this is the first release, and from what I can see it looks good. This could always be a future enhancement.

UPDATE: Shortly after I posted this I was looking over some other blogs and over at Gizmodo I saw that TiVo will indeed be adding the ability to login to your YouTube account, in an update due eight weeks out.

Dave also tacked a quick look at the Tuning Adapter and Network Remote Control screens at the end of the video. He says we can expect the official press release later today, and the application may start showing up on TiVos with 9.4 as early as today (Thursday) as well. TiVo has a new page on their site as well: http://www.tivo.com/youtube

Now that TiVo has support for H.264 and streaming video, I’m hopeful we’ll see more features using them. Aside from the aforementioned video podcast support, TiVo could support Amazon’s upcoming video streaming service, HD video downloads (most HD downloads use H.264), perhaps even streaming video between TiVo units, or from a PC to a TiVo.

I’m still waiting to receive 9.4 myself, can’t wait to play with this.

(And no Dave, you’re not the only one still waiting for Tekzilla. )

TiVo has long had the practice of trickling new updates out to a small number of users before officially deploying the update. It is a kind of feeler, one last check to make sure there are not major issues that were missed in testing, and to make sure the deployment systems are ready to go. And it looks like they’ve started to do that with the 9.4 update for the Series3 and TiVo HD, as users at TiVoCommunity have started to notice. You can tell it is a pre-release from the version number: 9.4.L6.01-2-648. That ‘L6′ indicates it is revision L, build 6 of the development effort. Final release versions drop that bit.

This looks like a great update, and it brings a number of features to the TiVo - some of which have been requested for years. According to LoREvanescence at TiVoCommunity, the updates notice is as follows:

Subject: You have a new service update!
From: The TiVo Team
Date: Tue 7/15

Congrats! You’ve just received the Summer 2008 TiVo Service Update for TiVo HD and Series 3 DVRs, including these new enhancements to your TiVo Experience:

*Play or Delete a Folder
Play or delete an entire folder of programs with a single button press (including kids shows, music videos ext). Highlight a folder and press PLAY to play all the shows in sequence. Pres CLEAR to delete the entire folder.

*Browse the Guide Any Time
Press the GUIDE button to display the program guide over what you’re watching: live TV, a previously recorded program, or even a video download.

*Jump Forward in the Guide
When the Guide is on-screen, press the ADVANCE to jump 24 hours ahead. Press INSTANT REPLAY to go back 24 hours.

*Find a Station in the Guide
Now you can search for a station “call sign” within the Guide, e.g. KQED, WPIX, MSNBC. When viewing the program guide, press ENTER to bring up Guide Options, then SELECT Find by call sign.

*Toggle Closed Captioning On and Off
The Closed Captioning icon in the Channel Banner now toggles closed captioning on and off.

*Review Thumb Ratings
To display a list of all programs that you have rated, select Find Programs, then TiVo Suggestions. Press ENTER to bring up the Review Thumbs screen

Enjoy!

-The TiVo Team

Playing or deleting an entire folder has been requested since the first day folders were introduced - probably before that during the beta for that matter. Being able to view the guide without jumping to Live TV is something that has probably been requested since the earliest days of TiVo. I know people have been asking for it since I first starting using TiVo in 2002. Being able to jump forward and back in the guide is something we just heard about as coming for the Comcast TiVo software, and in that post I said I hoped TiVo would add that to the standalone boxes too - and here it is.

Being able to find channels by call sign is interesting too, I’d never thought of that, but it sounds neat. Controlling Closed Captions from the channel banner, without having to go down in menus, has been requested since the S3 first shipped. So it is nice to see it added.

Reviewing the Thumb Ratings reminds me of the old hidden feature, Teach TiVo. Most of you probably don’t remember it, since it was a hidden feature and pretty much went away with the release of 3.2. But in the early days of TiVo there used to be backdoor features that could be enabled by entering the right phrase on the right screen. These were generally incomplete features that TiVo was working on developing but were not yet ready for release. So they’d still be in the code, just disabled by default. If you knew the right codes you could enable these features, at your own risk of course, and play with them. After 3.2 you could still access some of them for a while by hacking the software, but eventually most of them seem to have been completely removed, or well hidden. IIRC, Teach TiVo went away completely with 4.0.

So what was Teach TiVo? Well, early on TiVo wasn’t really sure how people would use TiVo. One of the concepts they had, to help with Suggestions, was to provide an interface in which users could edit their thumb ratings for not just programs, but actors, directors, etc. Basically it exposed the underlying thumb rating data system - when you rate a program you’re also influencing the ratings for any associated actors, directories, etc. Teach TiVo gave power users a way to fine tune their ratings. Say you hated a program, but happened to like one actor in it. You could rate the show down, but go in an adjust the actor’s rating up. Or vice-versa. But it did make for a bit of a complex interface and since it didn’t fit with TiVo’s philosophy of keeping the UI simple it was never completed and released.

So, anyway, this new ability to see your program thumb ratings and edit them sounds like a new, simplified approach to at least a subset of what Teach TiVo provided.

But that’s not all, exploring the menus has revealed some additional features. First and foremost, support for the Switched Digital Video (SDV) Tuning Adapter is here! Both Motorola and Cisco/Scientific Atlanta has their TAs scheduled for certification testing by CableLabs at the end of June. So if they passed testing we could see cable MSOs making them available soon, and it looks like TiVo users will be ready with 9.4.

And remember when the network remote control functionality was discovered in May? Since it is always on and has no security at all, at the time I said TiVo should really do something to protect that before someone writes malware designed to probe networks for a TiVo and send random commands to it. Well, it looks like TiVo has taken a step in that direction with 9.4 There is now a menu item for Network Remote Control and it is disabled by default:

“The network remote control feature allows your TiVo Digital Media Recorder to be integrated with home automation and entertainment control devices on your network. These device include touch panel remotes and other devices that are configured to work with TiVo’s network based remote control protocol. This setting will be enabled by your home entertainment or home automation installer.”

That’s certainly safer for the majority of users who will never use this feature, and the power users who will can easily enable it. It sounds like it is just an on/off toggle currently. I’d still like to see TiVo make it on/off/secure, with the secure option forcing some kind of authentication. But just being able to turn it off is a big step in the right direction and I’m glad TiVo did it. I just wish they’d officially publish the network remote protocol.

There is also a report that the Live TV buffer has been extended from 30 minutes to one hour. Looks like this was a false alarm, unfortunately.

Note that 9.4 is only for S3 & HD users, but I suspect there will be a 9.4.1 for S2 units to follow. We saw that with the last updates, with 9.3 for the S3 & HD, and then 9.3.1 for the S2. Since the TiVo HD is the current flagship and the focus for TiVo it isn’t surprising they’re now getting the updates first. Staggering the S3/HD and the S2 helps avoid overloading the engineering and beta teams by trying to do it all at once.

No word if this release includes updates under the covers to support H.264 decoding to handle the forthcoming YouTube support, or if that will be delivered in yet another update. I’d say it is a toss up. TiVo has certainly done that before, slipping features in an update deactivated and only enabling them later when the new feature launches.

The priority page hasn’t been updated yet for 9.4, but it probably will be soon.

Thanks to Dave Zatz of Zatz Not Funny for the heads up.