If I upgrade to Virgin 360....
I currently have a good set up using my TiVo box but keep getting messages to upgrade to 360 at no extra cost. If I get the upgrade will I be able to try it out first and if it doesn't suit my needs,keep the TiVo?
Hi TAZMANUK
At present both V6 boxes would receive an over the air regrade to the Horizon 360 system, although VM may change that at some future point.
The Horizon system is Liberty Global's (VM's owners) own in house cloud based TV entertainment platform which is used in the rest of Europe which don't have access to hard drives for recordings. This system has been specially adapted to enable hard drive recording usage in the UK.
Both boxes would retain their own 1tb of hard drive space for recording purposes (so 2tb in total)
In the UK the TV360 is based around one central recording pool (which as far as Horizon is concerned is one local hard drive shared between multiple slave boxes) so the recordings from the various boxes appear together in one interface irrespective of the box they were made on.
You can however view the planned and actual recordings on an individual box when going to Recordings > Recorded > View All > and then clicking on Recorded (to the right of the Search icon) and then click on 'Recorded on this Virgin TV box'. The interface will then list the recordings made on that particular box along with percentage space used on that box (you will need to do that each time you use that interface as the box doesn't save that option)
If you have two or more main 360 boxes with hard drives then you can choose which box to record on by fine tuning the recordings in the advanced settings. That program will then be recorded on that box going forward, even if the default recording box is one of the other boxes.You can't record radio programs on the 360 (even though some radio stations have been given channel numbers) because the stations are streamed.
One major problem with the 360 boxes is that there is no undelete option, so if you accidently delete a recording you can't back again like you can on the older tivo/V6 boxes. Since the recordings appear in a pooled interface you also need to be careful that somebody else doesn't delete a record that you want to keep/haven't watched yet.