Find what you've been missing. TiVo thread!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Find what you've been missing. TiVo thread!

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

chemosh6969 posted:

What kind of web stuff?

The YouTube interface is dog-rear end slow on my HD unit. I think they're proxying the content somehow, maybe to convert the videos that aren't available in H.264.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2008 11:05

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 11:42

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Deadpan Science posted:

My biggest tivo problem is channel changing. My sattelite box doesn't have a serial output, so I have to use the IR blasters. I'd say about 1-5 times I change a channel it goes to the wrong one. I refuse to have a big piece of foil over it.

It doesn't have to be foil -- anything that'll block IR will do it. But the only way to guarantee you never have a channel change screwed up by stray IR is to block the stray IR. Otherwise, sooner or later the TiVo will try to flip the channels on the satellite box while you're doing something else on another component and wham, bad channel change.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2008 08:02

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Strict 9 posted:

- I have Comcast's TiVo offering. It's an improvement from their old DVR, but I'm wondering what advantages I'd see if I got a genuine TiVo box. Obviously I'd have internet recording (a huge plus), Youtube / Netflix etc, but I'm also wondering if the "real" TiVo works any better. With the current one I have issues sometimes with my TiVo stalling, and doing things like scheduling a season pass take about 20-30 seconds.

Does Comcast's version let you move content back and forth between the box and the PC? If not that's a major benefit for the "real" hardware.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2009 07:12

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Golbez posted:

Also, killing two birds with one stone: Any potential drawbacks anyone sees with just moving the hard drive from the external casing into the TiVo itself? If that one turns out to be okay, that is.

I don't know about drawbacks but I can't see any obvious benefit. I suggest pulling everything you want to save down to your PC, then replacing the internal outright and seeing if that fixes the problem. Then if that works, try to add the external again -- if it turns out to have problems as well you should probably send it back to WD for repair/replacement (I'm assuming it's an "official" expansion drive...)

# ¿ Jul 5, 2009 01:04

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Golbez posted:

Benefit: Not having to buy a hard drive, making me feel less like like I wasted the money on the external drive. So if we were able to tell that the external had no problems, then great.

If it's an "official" external drive you waste less money keeping it as the external, assuming it works. It'll cost a lot more to buy another external to replace it than it would to buy a new drive to replace the internal.

You should be able to test both drives by connecting them to a PC -- I'd check on the TiVo Community Forums for the right procedure, though, just in case.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2009 17:16

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Golbez posted:

It's not warranteed, no. I'm going to do a backup of the internal (is it possible to just backup the important stuff and leave out the shows, or should I back it up after deleting the shows, or what?) just on basic principle, since this has scared me straight, but it's looking more and more like the defect is in the external. (see previous post)

You're going to need to image the drive exactly so deleting the shows probably won't make any difference. But you'll lose them anyway when you divorce the MyDVR Expander.

If you haven't already, you should check out the TiVo Community Forums Expansion/Upgrade FAQ. You have to follow some fairly specific guidelines when replacing the internal drive, particularly if you want to keep using the WD external afterwards.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2009 01:20

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

I hate to say this but if it's crashing just from user input you probably still have a problem. The only time I've ever managed to crash my HD was when I tried to feed it a bad transcode via pyTiVo.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2009 06:04

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

kri kri posted:

People fawn over Videoredo, but I think it costs money.

It does. You're paying for the fact that a) it Just Works and b) any moron can figure it out.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2009 20:55

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Maneki Neko posted:

Yeah, I have yet to run across any copy protected shows.

Gotta join the chorus on this. If you're running into copy-protected shows on a regular basis, it's your cable provider loving with you.

God knows TiVo isn't perfect, and no doubt plenty of people would be happier with different hardware. But sitting on the couch driving an XL4 with the iPad app still makes me feel like Zeus hurling thunderbolts down from Olympus.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2013 20:32

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Bugamol posted:

$300 (after tax) +$15 seems like a hefty investment for a cable box. Are the features/UI/usability functions really worth the price of entry?

If you only have cable TV because it comes with the apartment or it was just ten bucks more a month on top of the Internet connection you'd be paying for anyway, probably TiVo isn't worth the premium. If you have cable TV because you really want to watch shows from cable TV, and have more than a handful you care about following, and want to be able to watch them with a minimum of bullshit, it makes a lot more sense. I've been on TiVo since the first-gen Philips (on XL4 now) and still love it as a DVR. The current GUI is slick and effective, and like I said a few posts back, driving the box with the iPad app feels like being the God of Television. It's great always having a pile of stuff to watch that you know you're looking forward to watching, and it just works out of the box without a bunch of screwing around. That's the real selling point, I think�getting all the bullshit setup and maintenance out of the way so you can get on with watching the two seasons worth of Venture Bros. reruns that stacked up while you were busy doing other things.

(Xfinity OnDemand's TiVo support is region-by-region so if that's a deciding factor be sure to double-check that before you decide anything. But if it works in your area it's faster and easier to find stuff through the TiVo interface than the Comcast/Xfinity one.)

If you care a lot about streaming the argument for TiVo is a lot shakier. Integration of streaming and the main TiVo GUI is hit and miss�searches will find stuff on OnDemand or Amazon but if you want to look for something on Netflix you have to go off to Netflix Land, where the interface takes forever to fire up and is slow and clunky when you get there. The supported provider list is minuscule, and TiVo doesn't seem to be in any hurry to beef it up. We picked up a Roku 3 a few weeks ago so we could get MLB.TV and once we tried it we moved all the rest of our streaming over immediately. The GUI is much much faster (especially noticeable on Netflix), search works across more providers, and the selection of sources is literally an order of magnitude better (pretty much anyone can set up a channel that can play on the Roku, it even has its own little mini video darknet). And feeding content from my PC to Plex on the Roku makes the Home Media interface on the XL4 feel like browsing the web with Netscape Navigator 4. I think the difficulty TiVo has integrating other content sources like this is the biggest threat to their long term viability.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2013 06:17

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 11:42

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Or a smart remote (like a Harmony or something) that keeps track of what it needs to turn off.

# ¿ May 4, 2013 00:45

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Find what you've been missing. TiVo thread!