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Originally Posted by
captaincool01
Yep. That's a Series 1 alright. Although you are a brave person delaing with a zero feedback seller and not actually seeing what is in the box, or if it works.... or if you will ever get it. Still I guess we all had to start with no reputation or rating at sometime so I'm probably just being over cautious with all those stories you hear about ebay.
HDR212, meaning it will have a 20GB hard disk which will give you 8-10 hours of usable recording space. Forget the claim "20 hours" as this is in the "Basic" recording mode that compresses the picture so much it will be very blocky.
Also while on the subject of if you ever receive it: I hope you spent some decent money on Air Mail shipping to get it here in 14-21 days. If you elected for surface shipping then expect to wait anything from 8-12 weeks. Forget what the USPS website quotes for shipping times... double it. And of course the longer in transit the more risk it will get shipping wear and tear. Make sure the seller is specially packing it for a trip half way around the world.
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I thought, considering that my tv is NTSC/PAL compatible that it would be fine for the AV cables from Austar to run into the TIVO unit and then straight out of the TIVO and into the TV. Doesn't seem like a huge issue?! can i just change the output of the austar box to NTSC?
Unfortunately you assumed wrong. While you *can* output NTSC from a TiVo to your TV given your TV can accept NTSC you are going to have a problem with the Austar box. Unless you know something I don't then they have not got a setup option to make them output in NTSC. And even if they did you would most likely notice frame skip where 1-in-5 frames are dropped. Makes a fast moving scene look jerky.
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What sort of mods would I be looking at to accomplish this?
As already said: load on the oztivo software. At least this way you have full PAL compatibility. You are in a catch 22 anyway as the TiVo you have purchased will be locked to boot into Guided Setup meaning you will have to have it activated. You can't do that from Australia with the original USA software, and even if you could it would want to have a paid subscription and the TiVo will deactivate itself without one. This does not happen with the oztivo software.
Also if you don't want a network card then there are ways of accomplishing setting up a TiVo only with the oztivo software using other means like a serial cable from your PC to act like a network connection which you can then unplug after completing setup.
So do yourself a favour and reload the unit with the oztivo software. Better still, ditch the 20GB hard disk and spend the $100 or so for some decent size hard disk like a 200GB unit which will give you 80-100 hours recording space.
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Oh, basically I just want something to record an hour of tv every night and then re-record over it... a VCR would do the job... but i thought a tivo would be 'cool'.
TiVo's are "cool". But not in the way you want to go about setting up one. You're totally re-inventing the wheel of what has already over the last seven years been accomplished in Australia. If you only wanted something to record one program a night and erase it the next then you should have considered a DVD-RW recorder. Same functionality as what you wanted a TiVo for without all the headaches you are going to have with the way you want to run your TiVo.
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I already have a DVD player that plays divx/xvid movies so streaming from my PC isn't at all important.
Series 1 TiVo's can't stream Divx/Xvid from a PC anyway. Not enough processor power in them.
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I wish everything was as simple as when we were MOSCing the old austar cards!
I'm fairly sure you were not born known how to do that and had to learn by experimenting. TiVo is the same, even simpler.