I thought Drew’s comment explaining his purchase and modification of the TiVo HD was thorough enough that I’m publishing it here on its own. My own TiVo HD is currently en route from wherever Amazon was holding it hostage over the weekend; I’ll post my impressions after I get it set up.

Drew says:

I can sing the praises of the very similar TivoHD. A little over a year ago, all Ginna and I had in terms of DVRs was two lifetime equipped ReplayTVs. We got them both for under $200, about a year apart, and at a time when there was no TivoHD or Series3, they were fantastic. Networking and program sharing, component output, hacked with larger hard drives, plus no fees ever was a fantastic feature set. When we got married and had an actual living room for a nice HDTV, I looked at what Charter was offering for HD DVRs and I found the Motorola MOXI box. This piece of hardware was leaps and bounds above the ReplayTV, not just for allowing HD content but also in that it was a cable company box that would allow you to plug in your own USB hard drive to up your show storage. I used a 750GB WD My Book and we were off to the races.

I know I said I would talk about the TivoHD but I had to set it up first. When we moved from Athens to an area where only Comcast offered service, I again evaluated their HD DVR offerings and was completely let down. They wanted to charge more for the HD tier of programming and about the same amount to rent an HD DVR that had no expandability and drastically less HD recording than we were used to. Enter the TivoHD. I began looking for a way to get my storage up to near 100 HD hrs for the least amount of money possible. I had an interesting time getting two working cablecards delivered but when they got here I was in business with dual tuners for recording two HD programs at once, and when they finally found an M card I wasn’t willing to undo what the perfect working setup I had. Luckily the My Book hard drive was a perfect addition to the TivoHD once I opened the cases of each. So now I only pay the Tivo monthly subscription fee which is close to the box rental price from either Comcast or Charter and $1.50 for the second cablecard. The beautiful part about using TivoHD at least with Comcast is that they send over most of the HD channels unencrypted for the cablecard to pluck out and deliver in Hi-Def glory—sayonara HD programming package fee.

Now in addition to the cost savings and the additional supported features that Tivo brings to the table, TivoToGo, Online program Scheduling, etc., we genuinely love the interface. Ginna had become accustomed to the ReplayTV and MOXI interfaces and could navigate them just fine, but the layout for Tivo is much more user friendly and she liked it best of all systems the first time she tried it.

I talked to Garrett about installing the larger hard drive and certainly if maintaining a fully intact warranty is what you’re after than the Series 3 might be the way to go for its external-non-warranty-busting expandability. I wasn’t interested in going that route for a few reasons. 1) I wanted to use my existing hardware and luckily enough the My Book Hard drive was a SATA drive inside a USB enclosure, take it out it fits the TivoHD, leave it in, and it still can’t plug into the Series3, 2) like the ReplayTV, the Xbox, a Mio GPS, my three Linksys WRTs running DD-WRT firmware, or any other piece of electronic technology I own, if it can be hacked to add more useful functionality, and I am capable of doing it, then I will in fact do it. 3) The Tivo Community forums mentioned that while Tivo will still know that you opened your box after the hack, that if you have problems and reinstall the original drive, you can still get access to technical support. While I hope I never have to do that, I was perfectly willing to take my chances to create the best DVR I’ve ever seen, packed with storage, features, and the most usable interface out there.

That said, I highly recommend the TivoHD to anyone out there currently running a cable provider’s stock box. You will lose nothing and have everything to gain, particularly if you can get out of paying the programming fee to you provider and make use of the free HD content they provide to cablecard users.

Thanks for the free content, Drew! Your check’s in the mail.

Other Tivo Tidbits:

• The best deal for any HD TiVo at the moment seems to be the Refurb TiVo HD from tivo.com for $199 shipped with 1-year contract. (via Gizmodo)
• If you’ve earned any TiVo Rewards points that you have yet to spend or need to claim points on any referrals you’ve made, make sure and do it soon! TiVo is killing the program as of next month. I just spent half of my remaining points on a Glo Remote so that I can pretend my new TiVo HD is a S3.
• Lifetime subscriptions are still available to any current TiVo subscriber who activates a new HD TiVo on their account. Though I would qualify for this, the $399 is far too steep to justify the benefits of not paying month-to-month. Is there anyone out there who thinks this is four hundred bucks well-spent? When you consider that I had my refurb Series 2 boxes for just over two years, the ~$500 I’ve spent on TiVo Service Fees for both of them still beats the $600 I would have spent on lifetime, even before you consider the complicated TVM implications. The only variable is whether or not I would have reaped additional benefits when selling the used S2 boxes on eBay. I currently don’t plan to sell them because they’re only worth about 60 bucks each and my last eBay TiVo sale went very poorly. Had they carried lifetime subscriptions, I suppose that would have pushed them up into eBay-worthy territory.