There's a dirty little secret in the PVR world. Once you start using a personal video recorder, you're pretty much locked into continuing to use that recorder until you watch all of your recorded programs or decide you can live without them. That's because it's quite difficult to transfer your TiVo recordings to your generic cable company PVR.

Things should be a lot easier if you're using a PC-based PVR with software like BeyondTV, SageTV, or Windows Media Center. After all, your recorded shows are already on your hard drive, how hard could it be to try watching them with a new piece of software?

While you can certainly watch SageTV recordings in BeyondTV and vice versa, things get a bit complicated if you want to sort them by chronological order or view program descriptions. Fortunately, long time BeyondTV user Brent Evans has put together a comprehensive solution for importing your BeyondTV metadata into SageTV. That way users who might want to switch software packages can. Or better yet, users who want to test out SageTV without losing all of their recorded shows can do that too... and can still go back to BeyondTV if they like it better.

The whole operation isn't exactly user friendly. You'll need to download several applications built by members of the BeyondTV and SageTV community, export your BeyondTV data, convert it to a SageTV friendly format, and then import it into SageTV. But in the end, it'll all be worth it when you can see the cast of your cherished saved recording of Howard the Duck.

It's been a while since TiVo offered new customers a product lifetime subscription. But if you're one of the lucky few who picked up a TiVo Series1 or Series2 box back in the day and paid a flat fee for service, you're in luck. And by luck, I mean if you're ready to shell out even more money to buy a new TiVo HD, you can transfer your product lifetime service for an extra $199.

Of course, if you aren't planning on watching any high definition TV for a while, you might as well keep the box you've got. But if you were going to pick up a $300 TiVo HD anyway, this is a pretty good deal. You'd wind up spending over $150 on a one year subscription for your new box, which makes an extra $199 look like a pretty good deal.

There's no indication TiVo plans to offer newer customers a lifetime service option. This offer is geared at getting older customers to upgrade their boxes.

[Thanks Mandabar!]

When TiVo released its high definition Series3 recorder, the company sweetened the pot a bit for die-hard fans by offering existing customers who'd already shelled out the money on a product lifetime plan to transfer that service plan to their new $800 for a few hundred extra bones.

But in general, TiVo ain't in the business of offering lifetime service plans anymore. You just can't raise the same kind of money that way as you can with monthly or yearly service plans.

So that's why it's both surprising and pleasant to find that TiVo is letting customers transfer lifetime service plans again. This time, if you pick up a new 80-hour dual tuner Series2 box, you can transfer your service plan from your Series1 or Series2 box for $300. That includes the price of the new unit.

In order to qualify, you have to have activated your lifetime service plan before June of 2003. The offer ends July 23rd.

[via Zatz Not Funny]

(S02E17) When you spend at least 40 hours in a confined area with the same people five days a week, it would not be a stretch to say that some conflicts will arise. At the Scranton, Pennsylvania branch of Dunder Mifflin, the term "conflict" rises to a new level when we learn of some of the seemingly hundreds of issues the staff has with each other. Of course, Dwight, the resident psycho (who asks "Can you imagine if I was deranged?"), has a regularly scheduled time when he submits a complaint about Jim (Fridays at 4 pm) which he thinks are being sent to the corporate office, but end up in a box under Toby's desk.

Michael is not pleased with Toby's method of conflict resolution, so he decides to take matters into his own hands and whips out his "Mediator's Tool Chest" which he basically leverages to make sure that he comes out ahead, no matter what. The issues that the staff members have with each other are quite novel, including Angela and Oscar's dispute over her poster featuring two babies playing saxophones, and Ryan stating that Creed "smells like death."