For the most part, I really like our
HD, DirecTV TiVo. Most of the shows we (well, mostly I) watch from prime time television are available in HD, as we are able to receive all of the local stations' HD channels except for the WB's.
The WB station does have an HD channel, but it apparently is broadcasting at a pretty low power, and even though we live only about five miles from the broadcast tower, we can't get it. I actually found a picture of their signal strength graphed out on a map, and the lobes of strong signal radiate in the opposite direction from our house, leaving our area in basically a dead spot. The only show I follow on the WB is Smallville (which is available in HD), so I've learned to live with it after trying a number of different antennas and still not being able to get enough signal.
Also, the local UPN station, though it has a digital channel, is not yet broadcasting in HD, which means that I miss the HD version of Enterprise that is available in other markets.
Anyway, due to these missing HD channels, and some satellite channels that aren't available in HD like the Sci Fi Channel (where I watch the Stargate shows and now Battlestar Galactica), we have to record some programs in old-fashioned standard definition. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, and the HD TiVo is still a good way to record such shows because it provides the best picture on our Samsung DLP TV in the family room (unfortunately, however, it's not hooked up to the video distribution system like the
ReplayTV and SD TiVo are so it can't be watched in other rooms in the house). The "problem" with all of the shows I've listed here, however, is that they are now broadcast in a wide screen, letterboxed format, even when they are viewed in standard definition.
This should be nice with our TV, which, as an HD set, has a wide aspect ratio. Unfortunately, however, neither the TiVo nor the TV allows an HD signal to be zoomed in upon. The result is that instead of seeing the program filling the screen, it gets black bars not only on the left and right (like normal SD content), but also on the top and bottom, so there's a big black box around the picture. That just won't do.
The alternatives I've found so far in order to avoid this problem work, but are less than ideal.
One approach that I take is to record the shows on the ReplayTV or SD TiVo in the basement and watch it that way. These devices are moduled on channels that are "broadcast" throughout the house, and I can tune into them on the family room's TV. However, due to the composite video connection to the modulator (and the composite nature of a modulated signal anyway), the video quality suffers this way, and using the zoom mode on the TV makes this particularly noticeable.
Another, trickier solution is to record the programs on the ReplayTV (we have a 4000 series, which can be accessed via our Ethernet network). Then I can use ReplaySix and CinemaSix, programs that run on our
Roku HD1000 ("PhotoBridge"), to stream the show from the ReplayTV. This is nice because the output of the HD1000 is 720P, and CinemaSix is able to scale the video to that resolution while zooming in on the content. So this works nicely, but has a couple minor annoyances. First, finding material on the Replay can be tedious, as the UI of ReplaySix is pretty simple. Second, the skip ahead and back functions of CinemaSix are slow compared to the other DVRs (it
is streaming MPEG2 across Ethernet, after all, where the DVRs have access to the data via a hard drive). Also, there isn't a good readout of the location in the show while you're watching it. And finally is just makes things that much more complicated, as I have to switch devices, use a different remote (I should really program the Roku into our
Harmony remote).
Finally, because of the input we use on our Samsung TV, we can't see the TiVo if it's outputting to 480i, only 480p, 720p, or 1080i. With those inputs, the TV doesn't support zooming in on the image. We could hook the S-Video output of the DirecTiVo up to the TV as well, and tune to that input to watch this content. That should work, but it wouldn't look as good as the component output, and it would require us to change the TV input (and TiVo output) depending on what content we were watching. I may still do this eventually, but I also don't look forward to pulling out the TV and TiVo and fishing yet another cable through the tunnel between them.
Maybe a future software update to the HD TiVo will add the ability to zoom in on the image. Yeah, that'll happen (not). Oh well, if this is the kind of problem I have to complain about these days, then things must be going pretty well.
