Rejoice! Rejoice! A glorious day has arrived! Tivo announced yesterday that the highly anticipated High Definition Tivo for DirecTV units will be available this quarter.
The new DIRECTV HD DVR units will be powered by Tivo (just like the two previous generation DirecTivo/Direct DVR units), have four tuners and will be able to detect whether a broadcast is high-definition satellite, high definition OTA (over the air), or regular satellite feed for proper recording.
The DIRECTV HD DVR will have two DirecTV satellite inputs and one OTA antennae input. The OTA signal will be split internally so that two signals can be recorded at once off the antennae, just like Direct DVR customers are used to. The new units will be able to record HD OTA broadcasts and SD (standard digital) OTA broadcasts. So, if you local channels are being broadcast in HD, you could record those using the OTA tuners. Cool! Outputs on the unit are HDMI, Component, S-Video and Composite. (photo)
Most DirecTV customers will need to upgrade their dish units and probably run some additional cabling. Oh, and you might want to have an HDTV also. 🙂 (Happy birthday to me! Happy Birthday to me! Hey, Merrin go buy me a tv…Happy Birthday to me!)
More information, including a somewhat current rundown of HDTV programming, is available on a very verbose thread in the AVS Forums.
Quick update:
The DIRECTV HD DVR will sport a 250GB drive that will enable 30 hours of highest quality recording for HD broadcasts, or 200 hours for digital broadcasts, or any combination thereof.
Merrin, where’s my checkbook?!