Re: TiVo. Problems, hints and tips!
 

That's excellent, thanks for that.

Re: TiVo. Problems, hints and tips!
 

Not a tip per se, but a couple features that I loved on my old Tivo that for whatever reason never appeared on V+ or Sky+.

1. Record First Run Only - only record if it has never been shown on any UK channel ever. Great for pulling out that occasional new episode of the Simpsons or whatever.

2. Record at Most... great for getting stocking fillers of loads of shows - the wife likes the odd Oprah, 2 and a half men, that sort of rubbish. This feature used to let me always have the past 3 or 5 most recent episodes of fillers.

Re: TiVo. Problems, hints and tips!
 

Those feautures are on VM TiVo.

Re: TiVo. Problems, hints and tips!
 

I did have a Sony DVD player and Pioneer DVD player, which have now been replaced with a Samsung DVD recorder, and a JVC dvd recorder. All four play both NTSC and PAL disks fine, and will covert to PAL if needed (although all my TVs will do NTSC playback as well, so it's not a problem if they didn't anyway).

I don't know if it's the same in the US, but generally any DVD player sold in the UK will play NTSC discs, as long as either the disk is not region coded (which if recorded on a DVD recorder is likely to be the case) or the player has been unlocked.

Re: TiVo. Problems, hints and tips!
 

Nope - they're not as 'advanced' as this lot over here LOL. I'm from Canada (same video formats and equipment as the US), and while I can buy and play NTSC formatted discs and Videos from Canada and US and play them here, over there their TV's and video equipment cannot decode the PAL into an NTSC signal.

Though the other poster has said that his recorded videos work fine, so I may try recording a programme here onto DVD and seeing if my family can play them. Obviously as you say region coded DVD's cannot play (and you cannot cheaply - if at all - unlock regions in North American players to my knowledge - unlike here where most companies build in a code to unlock them) but maybe they can cope with just a recorded DVD. I'll have to give it a go.

Re: TiVo. Problems, hints and tips!
 

I think the main reason our DVD players will play NTSC discs is that region 2 includes Japan as well as Europe and they use NTSC in Japan. PAL-playback DVD players do seem to be getting more popular Stateside though. I have a friend in San Diego who has several players that'll convert PAL to NTSC as his family are huge Anglophiles and buy loads of British DVDs from Play.com

Re: TiVo. Problems, hints and tips!
 

Surely you mean 1TB.

Re: TiVo. Problems, hints and tips!
 

Actually, I read an article in a DVD magazine that suggested it was simply because it's considerably cheaper to maintain one manufacturing line that manufactures DVD players that can do both than it is to maintain two manufacturing lines that can each manufacture DVD players that can play PAL or NTSC.