But that’s always been one of TiVo greatest strengths. The TiVo program guide is much better than what you’ll find in the typical service-provider’s DVR. This text displayed in the left corner of the frame is your cue to push a button on the remote to skip past an entire commercial break. Unlike SkipMode, QuickMode will work with any program you’ve recorded. That’s because most broadcasts use Dolby Digital, and the soundtrack will drop back to ordinary PCM while in QuickMode. The soundtrack will sound different, though, especially if you’re listening through a receiver or home-theater-in-a-box system. And you can skip back and forth between quick and normal modes as many times as you want. Voices will sound normal-not like chipmunks-it will just seem as though they’re talking faster than normal. Press the Play and then Select on the remote with and the DVR will play the content 30 percent faster (1.3x normal speed) with pitch-corrected audio. QuickMode is the Bolt’s other coolest new feature. If the shows you’ve recorded support it, you’ll see a logo next to them in your queue. This is vastly superior to repeatedly tapping the fast-forward button to get through commercials, but it’s available on only 25 shows at launch (and only broadcasts between 4PM and midnight). An icon appears on the screen when a commercial break starts, suggesting you tap either the D button or the channel-up button on the TiVo remote: Press one and your program will skip directly to the next segment of the show. If you watch a lot of over-the-air programming, you’ll dig the Bolt’s SkipMode: TiVo embeds tags in the recording that identify where the commercial breaks begin and end. Press the button on the far left and the Bolt will cause its remote control to emit a sound to help you find it. Streaming outside the home will be supported down the road. It will also find recordings stored on other TiVo boxes, including the older Roamio series. The networking options are important because the Bolt can stream content within the home using a TiVo Mini or an Amazon Fire TV set-top box. The Bolt is also equipped with a Bluetooth radio, but the company hasn’t announced how that feature will be used (it’s dormant for now). You can add the Bolt to your network using either its gigabit ethernet port or MoCA 2.0 (Multimedia over Coax), or wirelessly via 802.11ac. You can plug in an external eSATA drive to increase your storage, but the Bolt won’t recognize drives plugged into either of its USB 2.0 ports. Neither of those options gives you a lot of storage capacity if you plan to record a lot of 4K video and retain it for very long. You have two storage options to start with: Internal hard drives providing either 500GB or 1TB of storage. An optical digital audio output (and an analog stereo audio out) enables you to handle audio separate from video, which is very useful if you want to hook the box up to an older A/V receiver that doesn’t support HDMI. There’s an HDMI 2.0 port, of course, and a coax connector for either your digital cable service or an over-the-air antenna (the Bolt has four ATSC tuners). Michael BrownĪpart from the TiVo logo, you’ll see just two LED indicator lights on the front of the Bolt.Īll of the Bolt’s I/O ports are on the back of the device. Let’s go over the rest of the Bolt’s hardware configuration before diving into its usability. Unlike most set-top box manufacturers, TiVo includes a six-foot HDMI 2.0 cable right in the box, so you don’t need to worry about your older cable being capable of supporting the higher resolution. The faster processor enables the Bolt to support 4K resolution, but you don’t need a 4K TV to take advantage of what the Bolt offers.
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