yah upgraded my cable for free...
 

Just called my cable company and said I was leaving. They just upgraded me to HD and gave me another premium channel for free. They are bringing the box over next week. |thumb

Nice.

I think I could have worked them harder... But I'm going back to the well for some more in a couple months or so.

Damn cable companies.

I have Directv and I have always been a fan of it. But a few weeks ago I was looking into getting the Directv Tivo box and discovered that each time you make any kind of change (additional equipment, change equipment, use their "free" moving service), they automatically sign you up for a two year contract, and if you cancel your service before those two years are up, they bill a penalty fee and you must return your equipment or be billed for that as well. I have no need for my Directv boxes if/when I cancel, but it pisses me off because I purchased those fucking things from a retailer -- I didn't get them from Directv for free. Directv now refers to that purchase price as a "rental deposit" or some shit like that so that they don't have to refund your loss. Fucking fuckers.

There are, as you can imagine, a bunch of civil suits against them for these practices.

So, I'm intentionally screwing myself out of being able to record television programming because I don't want a two year contract even though I can't see why I'd be canceling in the next couple of years anyway.

all 3 of my direct tv HD dvrs were free?
I may not be using them as much now though cause my new att u-verse service though it only comes with one dvr able to record 4 channels at once, the recorded shows are supposed to be accessible from all the other set top boxes which wil be sweet if I start watching a show in the living room and want to finish it in the bedroom :)

read the fine print on the HD equipment. $200 buyin, $4.95/month per receiver + upgrade in package pricing. (note: I have not checked in a while as I haven't really seen anything on HD that has excited me enough to want to upgrade the current TV + receiver + dvd player + + +)

http://freevo.sourceforge.net/
http://www.mythtv.org/

If you aren't recording HD, the best capture card you can really get for the money is about $160. Since it has a hardware mpeg encoder/decoder, you can skimp on the cpu horsepower of the box. A P3/800 would provide enough horsepower to record shows with live pauses. Anything above that and you'd have no problem. I believe with the hardware card for HD, you are looking at $280 for the HD card and it requires a P4/Celeron 2.4.

If you have spare equipment sitting around, you could probably build a box relatively cheaply and have the added bonus that you could encode your DVD collection, transfer movies from VCR to it, etc and your storage is only limited by the amount of disk space (or, you can burn CDs/DVDs of your saved content). You can surf the web on your tv, review submissions to your sites, write code, etc. Your couch could become your permanent spot and you'd never need to get up. During a commercial, open up the web browser and order a pizza. Showcase photos you've taken or, play music through your stereo/receiver/TV.

I keep telling myself I'll build one out of the spare parts I have...

I just got a notice that Directv is raising prices. Seems like a perfect time for that :)

Oddly enough, I started researching the process of building my own recorder from a spare computer here a couple of months immediately after looking into getting a Tivo from Directv. I burned a copy of mythtv but couldn't get it to install, but that's likely a problem with the glitchy, old hard drive in the spare PC I was trying to use. I already have a cheap capture card. Using that capture card and the software that came with it, I've recorded tv on to my work PC, but I don't think it has a way to sync with tv listings from http://www.schedulesdirect.org/ the way mythtv does. (I should probably see if that software only works with Windows or if it would install on an Ubuntu box.) For whatever reason, I stopped playing with my little homemade Tivo project, but I want to get it working in the near future.

I too, have no plans on going HD any time soon. Seeing HD programming at friends' homes has never really sold me on the quality. Everyone who has HD raves about it, but whenever I see it, I say, "yup - that's tv alright." :) I feel the same about Blue Ray DVDs. Yes, I see the quality difference, but I wouldn't say it's a big enough difference to motivate me to make the investment.