![]() I’ve experienced channels that stutter periodically or fail to load outright, and the integration with TiVo’s menus is ham-fisted at best. You know the app situation is dire when Ameba and FlixFling get prominent billing.Īs for the much-ballyhooed TiVo+ app, which streams live video from online sources such as FailArmy and FilmRise, it’s in rough shape at the moment. Most of them (save for the Fire TV Recast) even offer ad-skipping. ![]() With these devices, you can access live and recorded TV on a wide range of streaming video players, and the hardware is in most cases cheaper than TiVo’s as well. This omission is getting harder to excuse when so many other capable whole-home DVR options exist, including Tablo, Channels DVR, Plex DVR, and Amazon’s Fire TV Recast. It hasn’t said anything about those plans since. In January, TiVo announced plans to let users access their DVRs on streaming devices such as Roku starting in the spring. Although TiVo has demonstrated streaming apps for Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, and Android TV, it has yet to release any of them and has no updates on when it might do so. The biggest problem with TiVo today is one that’s existed for a long time now: Turning it into a whole-home DVR gets expensive fast.Īt present, the only way to access TiVo on more than one television is with additional TiVo Mini boxes, which cost $180 apiece. On the upside, TiVo’s remote does have a 30-second skip button, and its “QuickMode” feature, which increases playback speed without changing the pitch of the audio, is a helpful way to get through programs faster. TiVo still relies on human editors to identify commercials, however, and while this approach is more accurate than the ad-detection algorithms that some other DVRs use, it also means some recordings won’t support ad-skipping at all. TiVo has also added an automatic commercial-skip option in recent months, so you don’t need to hit the remote’s “Skip” button during every break. Jared Newman / IDGĬatching up on recordings is easy through TiVo’s “My Shows” menu. TiVo can even use its unoccupied DVR space to automatically record shows it thinks you’ll like. The “My Shows” list is a click away in the main menu, and it has a handy “Continue Watching” section for series that you’re in the middle of binge-watching. When it’s time to watch those recordings, TiVo does a fine job helping you sort through them. The “What to Watch” menu is helpful for seeing what’s on across live TV and select streaming apps. Finding potential shows to record is easy as well, thanks to a “What to Watch” menu that lets you browse across genres. You can watch recordings in progress and skip through the commercials, and you can pause or rewind any live program without having to record it first. With any show, you can choose which channels to record from, how many recent recordings to keep, and how much buffer time to include before and after the recording. That issue aside, the TiVo DVR experience remains top notch. TiVo’s “OnePass” menu lets you tweak recording options in myriad ways. You’ll still notice slight loading delays as you move through menus, and the interface still animates at a choppy 30 frames per second rather than the smoother frame rates you’ll find on modern streaming boxes. The TiVo Edge has mostly the same inputs and outputs as previous versions, but it drops the obsolete eSATA port.Ĭompared to the Bolt, the TiVo Edge has a faster processor and more memory (4GB instead of 3GB), but those upgrades don’t translate to a major performance boost. Unfortunately, the USB ports still don’t support external hard drives, so they don’t serve much purpose beyond charging your phone. The old eSATA port for storage expansion is gone, but WD stopped selling its sole compatible hard drive years ago anyway. The port arrangement around back has barely changed despite the new look, with a coaxial input, optical audio output, HDMI, a pair of USB ports, ethernet, and a remote finder button that plays a tone on the TiVo remote. With the Bolt, I could hear it whirring from the other side of my office, but the Edge becomes inaudible from just a foot or two away. The result is a better thermal design that runs a lot quieter. Instead of having an arched enclosure, the Edge is a flat plastic slab with a ledge that runs around the front and sides. With both TiVo Edge variants, the design of the box itself is a big improvement over the previous TiVo Bolt.
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