May 24
I haven’t been able to post much of late thanks to a lack of time. The daily grind of work has been insane the last couple weeks thanks to us switching over to a new pipe (from 1.5MB to 4.5MB) to our CT office and switching over to a hosted VoIP solution with a company called Smoothstone. The transition went pretty smooth considering and as of Thursday night the majority of things had finally completed. Over the next couple months I will keep an eye on the system and give a real work view of what they offer.
Mar 12
A few months ago I gave a tryout to a free inventory management tool called Spiceworks. I had always been hesitant trying out freeware but it was worth a look at and since then I haven’t looked back. While it is not perfect (I still wish it had AD integration) you can’t beat it for the price, especially in today’s dwindling IT budgets.
Well I just stumbled upon another tool (thanks 4sysops) called Spotlight on Windows. This looks like a dream tool to manage your system’s health, monitor Event Logs, etc. I hope this is as good as Spiceworks!
Mar 5
As I am planning out my 2009 data-center implementation at my job I learned that Dell and HP are going to be releasing their servers with VMWare ESX 3i “embedded” in early April for Dell and March 31, 2008 for HP. For those considering virtualized environments and are considering diskless servers, this might be the way to go!
Aug 22
For almost 17 months my household had enjoyed a 40 hour Series 2 TiVo with almost no problems at all, but for May and June the unit was progressively dying, what was once the occasional artifacts became “Dark Screens of Infinite Pause”. Since then we had contemplated what its replacement unit would be. After moving to NY, we decided to give the Scientific Atlanta 8300HD a test spin.
Preface
This article was originally two articles (published on 07/19/2005 and 11/16/2005) first praising the unit and then scaling back that praise. I have decided to combine both articles into this single article.
Introduction
It was time to contemplate a TiVo replacement. Knowing that we were now in New York and Time Warner land (my previous cable provider was Comcast) I knew that they had a TiVo-like unit that I began investigating. The Scientific Atlanta 8300HD was a huge step in the right direction for Time Warner, many people had complained about the older unit (the S/A 8000) had a cumbersome UI and was breaking left and right. For what few reviews I could dig up, the S/A8300HD was a big improvement over the old PVR, but would it be good enough to replace my now dead TiVo?
So for a period of time we decided to experiment with the S/A 8300HD, learn its strength and weaknesses, and if the unit proves unworthy, we will buy another TiVo.
Available models
There are 4 major models from Scientific Atlanta that Time Warner uses in its DVR arsenal. The S/A 8000 (Standard, MR, HD, HD/MR) and the S/A 8300 (Standard, MR, HD, HD/MR). Now as you can deduct from logic, anything with the suffix HD is a high definition unit, the MR is a designation for Multi-Room which will allow you to stream to other digital cable boxes from the main box programming you have recorded. The MR units were not available in our region, so I opted for the S/A 8300HD. The older units are famed to have a horrible UI and a lower capacity hard drive to boot, so for this task I was going to go for the biggest and the best. Ensuring that we got the proper unit wasn’t nearly a problem as I thought it would be, but the Time Warner customer representative had the notion that the HD unit was inferior to the standard units. I just simply passed this off as nonsense, and continued with my order for the S/A 8300HD.
S/A 8300HD Specs
The S/A 8300HD has a list of impressive features including:
What the S/A 8300HD lacks
Initial ImpressionsAfter the Time Warner technician dropped off the box and ensured everything was working, I immediately went to programming some “Season Passes”, now the Passport software does not call them season passes, but they will record all shows in a season, only at certain times, channels, you control how expansive the recording parameters are.
One thing I noticed is that Passport is not intelligent enough not re-record a program like the TiVo can. But with the large capacity and normal pruning of the list, this is easily maintained. A feature that I wish that Passport would incorporate to make things more organized is a “group by” feature so people can group by date, show, or other criteria that will allow people to better organize their recordings.
The unit’s guide and setting items to record are very responsive, and it reduces the live program to the right corner of the screen so you are not sitting through total silence while managing your programs.
Long Term Impressions
After a couple months of use, the S/A 8300HD has been increasingly showing signs of unreliability. These have included:
With those facts out of the way, my wife and I have been increasingly longing for the return of the TiVo into our entertainment cabinet. My wife was the first to want the TiVo to return, literally days after trying the S/A 8300HD out, and since the technical malfunctions have been happening, and now so have I. We have moved the S/A 8300HD to the bedroom to perform minor recording tasks, and our replacement TiVo now sits comfortably in our entertainment center.
This is not to say the S/A 8300HD is a total failure, quite the contrary. If Time Warner could improve to make features like suggestions a reality, and work out the bugs that make the unit not perform as expected, I think they could give TiVo a real fight.
For now I would recommend only getting the S/A 8300HD if you want to keep your entertainment center streamlined, demand dual-tuner capabilities, or if you feel suggestions are not needed for your experience. With the TiVo series 3 on the horizon it could be that there are no reasons to switch over to a cable company’s DVR offerings.