Category movies

Well, that went well. I just bought an 80 hour TiVo off of eBay, and it should end up costing absolutely nothing.

Here’s how the deal went…

It seems that last week Sam’s Club was selling Humax-branded 80 hour TiVos (the are the same as the normal ones, just with a different looking case) for $49 or so. This guy bought as many as he could find and is now selling them on eBay for $99.99 Buy-it-Now with $15 DHL shipping. He runs a shop and sells car parts on eBay normally, so they just do billing via CC over the phone. So, I used MBNA’s Shop Safe stuff to generate a one-time number, gave him a call, and paid for things.

When purchasing these he also got separate receipts for each one, and he’ll be including the original store receipt with the unit. This means that I can legally and honestly file for the $100 mail-in rebate when I activate the unit. In addition, he said that if I use his email address as person-who-referred-me when signing up for TiVo service, that I should drop him a piece of email and he’ll refund me the shipping cost. This should bring the total cost for the TiVo down to $0, with my only having to pay the $11.95/mo charge. This seems like a really good deal.

In addition, it should be wholly possible to add / replace hard drives in the unit, should I find that I want more storage.

Oh, if you are wanting to get one yourself from this same guy, look here for his auctions. It’s a guy named Brian who seemed to be really friendly. He’s also in Xenia, Ohio so shipping to the Detroit area should be real fast.

So, I think it’s a good thing that Costco was all out of them at lunch. How interesting that it worked out that way… :D

So I’m thinking of getting a TiVo. Here’s why… Costco has 80GB (80 hour) TiVos for $269, with a $100 mail-in rebate. The monthly charge is $12.95. I’ve been thinking of resubscribing to Netflix, but that’s $20/mo, and I mostly tend to want content to watch while eating dinner or whatnot. This means :30 tv shows or so. Netflix has a harder time providing this…

I’ve thought about building a MythTV box, but with the cost of a large hard drive, memory, quiet case, and a MPEG2 video capture board, I’m looking at around $400 to get things going this route, plus my time. At this rate the break-even point would be 17 months… Granted, MythTV would allow me to do more with the captured files, but if I want a captured show, I’ll be doing it in DV, not MPEG2, and thusly using the capture device on my Mac. So, that’s kinda out the window…

Hmm, does anyone who reads this have a Series 2 TiVo and actually use it? The price isn’t too bad, and I think it’d be pretty handy… Costco’s price is also a lot cheaper than buying it from Best Buy or Netflix.

One other neat thing… Hopefully Tivo will get around to releasing a new Mac version of TiVo Desktop fairly soon, which will allow me to watch recorded shows on my Mac. Right now it’d be PC-only. Poo.