Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 13 years and 8 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

It’s been almost three years since I bought a new TiVo, so it was time. I’ve added the new TiVo Premiere to my main home theater setup, relegating my trusty, original Series3 box to home office duty.

I already had the 1TB WD Expander drive from the Series3, so rather than spend the extra cash on the Premiere XL, I went with the base 320gb model and then connected the Expander giving me 190 hours of HD recording capacity.

The new box is the smallest TiVo yet, measuring just 16″ wide,  10″ deep and 3″ high. Like the older HD TiVo models, you’ll need a CableCARD from your cable provider to receive your encrypted digital cable channels, and possibly a tuning adapter if any channels are SDV. Unlike the prior models, however, the Premiere only has a single CableCARD slot (which has been moved to the rear again, like the Series3) and only accepts a multi-stream card (MCard). The Premiere has HDMI, component, composite, and optical jacks for video and audio (but no more S-Video); USB ports for your wireless network (including TiVo’s new N adapter) or tuning adapter; eSATA for drive expansion, and a network jack for wired connectivity. Coax connectors for cable and antenna round out the jack pack. The Premiere is also the fastest (and greenest) TiVo yet, using a dual-core 400MHz MIPS processor (although currently only one core is enabled) with 512mb of RAM (double that of previous models) while consuming only about 26 watts. The included peanut remote is just about the same except for the addition of new A, B, C, and D buttons that are used for shortcuts in the interface. The Premiere XL comes with the backlit learning version of the peanut remote, and TiVo will soon be releasing a remote with a Bluetooth slide-out QWERTY keyboard that looks pretty slick.

The Premiere is billed as the “one box” meant to replace your cable set-top box, Roku, HTPC, etc. The new HD interface (more on that later) integrates searching across video sources like your cable television channels, NetFlix, Blockbuster, Amazon OnDemand, and even YouTube. There’s now a video window (think picture-in-picture) in the HD menus so you can keep an eye on Live TV (or a recording you’re playing back) while navigating the menus. Another new feature I like is the episode guide: pick a show and then you can browse the different seasons and episodes for that show, making it easy to create an auto-record WishList for a specific episode if you so desire. Also new (for those people who have been asking for it for years) is a capacity meter in My Shows so you can see how full your disk is. Of course you also get all the regular TiVo functionality like controlling Live TV, Season Passes, WishLists, viewing your photo library or playing your music collection (using TiVo Desktop). My favorite apps like Galleon, pyTivo, and streambaby all work with the Premiere as well.

Sounds great so far, right? Unfortunately, right now the new HDUI is very sluggish. Navigating between screens (like from TiVo Central to My Shows) can take several seconds. While watching Live TV, if I press the TiVo button on my remote to go into TiVo Central, I’ll see a black screen for a few seconds, then the video window will appear, and finally the rest of the menu. Definitely not the TiVo experience I’ve come to expect. Performance is supposed to improve with the new 14.5 software update that is slowly rolling out, but I haven’t received it yet. It is also generally assumed performance will increase once the second CPU core is enabled (but there has been no announcement on the timeframe for that). The HDUI is also incomplete: screens like the To Do List, Season Pass Manager, and all of the settings are still in the old-style standard definition layout. Some features, like Parental Controls, are only available by switching to the SDUI entirely. It can be a bit jarring going back and forth between interfaces as you navigate the menus. Hopefully these other screens will be added to the HDUI in future updates. If you do switch the classic menus, though, performance is extremely snappy! Right now I’m sticking with the HDUI so I can learn the ins-and-outs of the new interface.

Another “feature” of the HDUI is the Discovery Bar, that scrolling bar of pictures across the top of every screen. The Discovery Bar contains suggestions for shows you might like, tips/tricks, and (ugh!) advertising. I don’t like it. I dislike the Gold Stars and other advertising items that appear on TiVo Central on my other TiVos, now the Discovery Bar is present on every HD menu screen. It’s supposed to customize itself using your preferences (like Thumbs ratings) and the screen you are currently on, and you can tweak the settings for the Bar itself, but you can’t turn it off completely! I don’t like the cluttered look this brings to the TiVo menus. Plus, I suspect the Discovery Bar is contributing to the slow performance of the new interface since as I navigate to each screen I can watch as each block of the Discovery Bar fills in, presumably with content being pulled over my internet connection. If you disconnect your TiVo from the network, the Discovery Bar goes away, but it’s replaced with a big warning message about certain content/features not working without an internet connection. Disappointing, but I’m sure I’ll learn to live with it just like Gold Stars and the Pause menu “more information” ads.

One other drawback to the Premiere is that the current user-developed hard drive upgrade tools, like MFSLive, won’t work due to changes in the file system and partition structure. It’s being worked on, but for now if you want to increase your internal capacity you’ll need to buy a pre-imaged drive from a third-party like Weaknees (the other option being an external eSATA expander like I have).

I’ve only had the Premiere for a few days and other than the slow performance and incomplete HD interface (both of which I’m sure will be addressed in future software updates), I’m happy with it. For more facts (and pictures) about the TiVo Premiere, be sure to check out bkdtv’s excellent FAQ on the TiVo Community Forum.