jrsl76

So, I am just going to apologize up front. I did a search and went through many, many pages to find this, but got bogged down in too much info and not what I was looking for. Basically, this is my situation and question. As next seasons TV schedules have been announced I was faced with a problem. This past season got me in the situation of watching and enjoying the most programs I ever have for a season (7). With the new schedules, 4 shows now conflict: on Wednesdays at 9pm, Lost and Veronica Mars, and on Thursdays at 8pm, The O.C. and Alias. For this reason, I am considering trying out Tivo. I am a bit ignorant to how it works and so I put it to those in the know, Can I record one show with a Tivo and watch/record via VCR the other show at the same time? I go to work at 10pm on weeknights, so I am trying to figure out a solution to this. Any help is very appreciated. Thanks!

Y2K Falcon

Whatcha got? Cable? Satellite? And with who?

With cable, it seems like a splitter (and possibly a vcr, a/b switch, etc.) would be your friend. With satellite, a dual tuner DirecTV DVR would take care of it. With Dish, I'm not as much of an expert...

If it's cable, are any of these channels digital?

Also, for cable, are you thinking of getting a TiVo say at best buy, or one provided by your cable company?

shelland

A dual tuner DVR (whether it be from DTV, Dish, cable) will tape both programs at once. With stand-alone Tivo, there is a way to splice to record one channel and watch another, but I've never done it myself - I believe there are instructions on the Tivo website. I don't know if ReplayTV will do it or not.

sman113

There are instructions on the TV website you can look at. They go through every option. Basically you will be watching one, while Tivo'ing the other, using a cable splitter. I guess you could hook up a VCR to the second cable line (or another tivo ;])

jrsl76

Actually, I was just doing my preliminary investigation on this. I am moving into an apartment where they already have cable this weekend and thought I would ask in advance. You all have given me many things to look into. Thanks.

Gojira69

I have 2 DirecTivos at home. Both have dual-tuners. That means we can and do record 4 shows concurrently and watch 2 other (already recorded only) shows at the same time.

Not to mention since I also hacked them, they are now networked. That way I am able to watch recorded shows from either dTiVo on the other dTivo, and since I've upgraded both dTiVos to bigger hard drives I have a total of 365 "best quality" recording hours between them.

dTivos are great also because there is no analog conversion in the process so you get an exact copy of DTV's broadcast stream.