I just boxed up my ReplayTV because Comcast just brought me THE box. It records two shows at the same time, works as an HD tuner, and records in HD. The HD PVR part is beautiful. Hackability? Not my dept.

hmmmm! I didn’t know Comcast had an HD PVR! Their website sucks, and there is no information about an HD PVR on it. But I’ll call them and find out about it.

I just called Comcast and they say that the DVR isn’t quite out yet. Are you a tester, Grant? They estimate release in “a couple months,” which might work well with my time frame.

I’d love a PVR that supports HD. I don’t need hackability so much, I suppose, although I do like to rip videos and bring them along during my travels…

I hope to gawd it’s better than their SDTV PVR (same one I used on TimeWarner). That thing was SUCH a piece of crap and the reason I ended up getting DirecTivo in the first place :) The recording quality and usability was just horrid. Getting the Tivo afterwards, I was like – wow, this is how it’s supposed to work.

But that was gen 1, and I know jack-diddly about the HD-DVRs the cable companies are offering now. The cool thing is you don’t have to buy the equipment, though I think they smack you upside with the monthly charge a bit.

MSFT is partnering with Comcast on the box but I’m not a tester. It’s just getting rolled out in Seattle (last week was the first week available) but I thought it was a national roll-out. I’m a bit surprised that it’s not available in SF.

The PVR interface isn’t as slick as TiVo or Replay, but IMO it’s worth it for the picture. Maybe I’ll like the menus, etc. more after I’ve had a bit more time to recalibrate my head around them.

As far as hackability, the box belongs to Comcast, but it does come with a two USB ports and an Ethernet port…so you might be able to extract some stuff out of it. Dunno. I do know some people here who have built their own hi-def laptop Media Centers.

Also, Business 2.0 has a great article on Sling Media, which could be your greatest friend on the road.

Thanks, Grant. I was wondering what the picture quality is like for normal television.

I was going to set up a Media Center box, but the normal TV quality looks pretty horrible. Granted, I haven’t seen one using a high quality hardware mpeg2 encoder, but it just doesn’t quite seem to be there yet.

Once it can accept a cable HD signal, media center pcs will be much more interesting!