By DAVID POGUE
Published: November 13, 2003
SOONER or later, the technologies of the various areas of our lives merge,
resulting in a savings of cost, cables and clutter. For the nightstand, you
can buy a clock-radio-telephone. In the car, you've got one
radio-CD-player-heating-control unit. In your pocket, a Swiss Army knife.
But the area around the TV is still a mess. By the time you've installed
your cable box, VCR, TiVo and DVD player-recorder, you've built a
techno-tower crisscrossed by cables and overrun by remotes. If ever an area
cried out for consolidation, the TV room is it.
The industry has taken a few tentative steps in that direction: combo
VCR-DVD players fill the shelves at Costco and Circuit City, and Toshiba
recently unveiled a $400 TiVo with built-in DVD player. But those early
attempts should bow down before the sweet perfection of a new pair of
hybrids: Pioneer's new DVR-810H and Elite DVR-57H.
Each of these remarkable machines is a TiVo recorder, DVD player and DVD
recorder in a single box, with one remote that also controls your TV.
The TiVo part means that you can freeze, rewind or instantly replay whatever
you're watching; record a show (or, rather, a lot of shows) on its built-in
hard drive for instant playback at any time; and skip over ads.
Above all, a digital video recorder, or DVR, like TiVo permanently
disconnects the broadcast time from the viewing time. By the time TiVo
zealots - which is pretty much everyone who has ever bought one - blip over
the ads, credits, recaps and promos, they can watch a one-hour show in about
35 minutes. No wonder they never, ever watch whatever junk happens to be on
at the moment.
These Pioneers are also first-class DVD (and CD) players, made all the more
likable because you control a disc's playback with the same buttons on the
remote that you use for TiVo playback. If your TV has so-called
component-video inputs (inexplicably labeled Y, Pb and Pr) the DVD player
rewards you with progressive-scan output. (Translation: very high video
quality found in fancier DVD players.)
But the real magic happens when you highlight a recorded show in the TiVo's
Now Playing list and press the Copy to DVD button. A graph of the blank DVD
fills up as you select more shows to record onto it. (If a movie is too long
to fit on one DVD, the TiVo will even split it onto multiple discs for
you.)
Another button press begins creating your very own homemade DVD. That may
sound like a serious technical business, but on this machine, it's every bit
as casual and effortless as using a VCR. The result is a disc that plays on
any standard DVD player of recent vintage.
If this method of burning a DVD sounds simple and obvious, you've clearly
never tried one of the other set-top DVD burners. For example, the TiVo
already knows each show's name, so you don't have to type in the title of
each show you're copying - a grueling exercise on other DVD recorders, given
the absence of alphabet keys. This is the only DVD burner that approaches
the simplicity of a VCR, and the only one you'd ever wish upon, say, your
parents.
And now, an important digression into video-recording quality. Like any
video recorder, the TiVo offers a choice of recording speeds. At Extreme
quality, which looks spectacular, the "80 hour" Pioneer holds only 14 hours
of shows. It holds 80 hours only in the lowest-quality mode, Basic, also
known as "yucky."
Now, hard-drive capacity isn't nearly as important on this TiVo as it is on
a regular TiVo, because you can always offload your recordings onto DVD's
when the hard drive begins to fill up.
Even so, the different recording modes become important when you begin
copying shows from the Pioneer's hard drive to a DVD, because the quality
setting determines how much video will fit on a disc. At Extreme quality,
each disc holds only an hour; at High, two hours; Medium, four hours; and
Basic quality, six hours.
Using blank DVD's labeled 2x or 4x, it takes about an hour to burn a DVD.
DVD-RW (erasable) discs take longer, and so do the older, 1x blank discs.
(In any case, you can continue watching TV and using the TiVo while the
burning takes place.)
The Pioneers can record onto both DVD-R discs (about $50 for a 25-pack) and
DVD-RW discs, which you can erase and use again. That feature makes it easy
and practical to dump some shows onto DVD for, say, a car trip with the
kids, and then use the same disc later for a couple of "West Wing" episodes
for your plane flight.
Pioneer was wise to let TiVo design the software and write the manual, which
ought to win matching Pulitzers. But before you go charging off to
www.pioneerburner.com for more information, you should note three drawbacks.
First, a delicious new TiVo option lets you record old VHS tapes and
camcorder movies directly onto the hard drive, and burn them from there onto
DVD's. In the process, you give your video a new lease on life with a much
longer life expectancy. Trouble is, you have to hook up your camcorder by
using analog connectors. There's no FireWire connector that can accommodate
(and preserve the pristine video from) digital camcorders - an oversight the
size of Orson Welles.
The second limitation applies only to TiVo fans who have signed up for the
Home Media Option. (That's a $100 software upgrade that lets you shuttle
recordings between TiVo recorders in your house across a home network, or
play music and photos from your computer on the TV screen.) If you connect
the Pioneer to your home network, you can watch shows from another TiVo in
the house, but can't record them onto DVD's.
Finally - are you lying down? - there's the matter of the price. Pioneer's
suggested price for the 80-hour DVR-801H is $1,200 - and for its 120-hour
Elite DVR-57H, a staggering $1,800. Has Pioneer gone stark, raving mad?
You can find much better prices online - $725 and $1,400, respectively. But
that's still a lot.
And that's not even the whole price story.
Now, unlike the owners of the stand-alone TiVo, you don't have to sign up
for any kind of paid subscription plan to use the Pioneer. You get TiVo's
on-screen TV-guide service - the channel grid that you use to choose
programs for recording - free.
But this free service, called TiVo Basic, offers listings for only the next
three days, not two weeks like the regular TiVo. It doesn't let you search
for a show by name, schedule a Season Pass (where you tell the machine,
"Record every episode of this, every week"), or set up a Wish List ("If a
show with this actor, director, or title ever comes on, record it
automatically").
These traditional TiVo perks are available only if you upgrade your machine
to TiVo Plus, which costs $13 a month or a one-shot payment of $300.
(Footnotes: You get an automatic 45-day free trial of TiVo Plus, you can
upgrade or cancel at any time, and you can get a $50 rebate before the end
of the year.)
To attain your Pioneer's fullest potential, then, you're talking about $725
for the 80-hour box, plus $300 for TiVo Plus. This holiday season, the
rafters will echo with the voices of livid spouses: "You want to spend
$1,025 on a VCR!?"
One possible counter-argument: "Yeah, but we'd pay pretty much the same
amount if we bought the components separately" ($300 for an 80-hour
stand-alone TiVo, $300 for the lifetime service, $450 for a DVD recorder).
Don't forget that business about saving space, clutter, cables, and remote
controls, either.
The bottom line is that the Pioneer TiVo is far better designed and easier
to use than any other DVD recorder. The question isn't whether or not people
should buy it; the only question is whether or not they can.
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