TiVo gets the best of me
December 18 2005
I haven't blogged about TiVo in a long
time, though I continue to be very happy with the service. Recently,
though, the power supply died in my six-month-old TiVo Series 2 unit. While
covered under warranty, this required Humax to send me out a new unit,
as the power supply can't be replaced separately. So, a new (well,
refurbished) unit arrived on Friday. It's date of manufacture, in
Mexico -- December 9, 2005. Interesting supply chain metric there.
Anyway, knowing that it was just the power supply that was out on my old
TiVo unit, I planned to swap the hard drives between old and new upon the
new unit's arrival. I wanted to get at all those saved episodes of
Dora the Explorer for my daughter, of course. So, I opened up both
units, saw that the contents were entirely the same, and proceeded to switch
the hard drives. Once complete, I connected the new TiVo, and got
nothing but a blinking green light. Oops.
I figured I was busted on the hard drive swap, so I switched them back.
Plugged it in, and same blinking light. Weird...could TiVo
have shipped me a broken replacement?
A couple of hours later, I thought I'd take another look inside and see
what might be wrong. There are very few moving parts on the TiVo,
so there wasn't much to go wrong. I discovered, though, that I had
in fact screwed up one of the few things that could go wrong. I had
connected the ribbon cable to the hard drive upside down. Not
often that an interface connector will go in two different ways, but this
one apparently does. Once I righted this, the unit booted up just
fine. Note: I suppose this means I will have to give back my geek
merit badge.
Now I had a new problem -- the old hard drive was causing an error in the
new TiVo box, and I couldn't even so much as watch the existing recorded
programs until the hardware problem was resolved. It appeared I was
indeed busted on the hard drive swap. Bummer. Sadly, I put
the new HD back in the new unit and was off and running.
The last challenge was when the new unit asked me to activate. Going
to Tivo.com/activate and following the steps provided me with the opportunity
to sign up for TiVo monthly service again. Already being $300 into
the last unit for lifetime service, I was concerned that the new unit didn't
map up to me as a subscriber. So, I went the old fashioned way and
picked up the phone. There I was reassured that my lifetime service
was indeed transferable to the new unit, and they took care of this for
me.
I just spent ten minutes putting all my "season passes" on the
new TiVo. In the meantime, I've missed about three weeks of Law &
Order/Law&Order CI and am going through withdrawl. Anyone happen
to TiVo the last few weeks?
Post a Comment
- 2
Wild Bill http://www.billbuchan.com | 12/19/2005 12:03:35 AM
Heey - look on the bright side. In the UK we're still restricted to Series 1 Tivos - so mine has a cachecard and a 100mb/s ethernet card (courtesy of ninthtee) - and I regularly hoover the shows from the Tivo to MPEG, so that my Liteon DVD player can see them on the file share of the linux box...
My poor tivo has been chugging away under the TV for three years now - and is looking increasingly old. But till I see one that does Tivo, DVD (with Dolby Sound) and can play stuff off network shares - then I'm not interested in upgrading...
And to think its running a very very old Power PC chip and linux. One of the more reliable devices at Casa Buchan (dont talk to me about the windows mobile phone!)
Just waiting for the news on the Mac-Mini PVR stuff from MacWorld in early january now...
--* Bill
- 3
Rick Sizemore | 12/19/2005 4:45:37 AM
Ed, if you grab a bittorrent client, you can usually find the episodes online. That's what I do when I'm on the road, usually in HD too.
- 4
Ben Rose http://www.jaffacake.net | 12/19/2005 6:31:07 AM
Ed - As Rick said, download them...or get a buddy to do it for you!
Which season do you want? ;O)
- 5
Rob McDonagh www.CaptainOblivious.com | 12/19/2005 8:52:26 AM
Ed, you can probably put the old drive into a random PC and use tools (TiVo underground site is a start) to extract the shows and watch them there. Or, as others have said, get the episodes online via torrent and burn DVDs of them. One thing that cracks me up about TV shows via torrent is that many of them have already been edited to remove the commercials...
PS If there's nothing wrong with the old drive, you should think about configuring it as a second drive within the TiVo. So, you know, you could have 63 Dora episodes like I do...
- 6
Brian Green | 12/19/2005 9:29:06 AM
I admit it... I have a UPS for my TIVO.
- 7
Wild Bill http://www.billbuchan.com | 12/19/2005 9:34:37 AM
@6 - Woaaaaaaaa - nice one - hardcore! I'd not thought about doing that... mmmm...
---* Bill
- 8
Bill Geimer | 12/19/2005 10:12:17 AM
You mean you don't watch the Law & Order channel, A.K.A. USA on cable / satellite?
- 9
Rick Sizemore | 12/20/2005 1:18:32 AM
Yeah, UPS for TIVO is a must. You never know when the power will go out. I've a 2kva one that should give me a couple of hours of no power TIVO juice.
TIVO, or DVR in general, is like crack, I'd rather TIVO a show in SD than wade thru the commercials in HD, thank you HD TIVO.
- 10
Tony Kelleran http://www.dominodude.com | 12/20/2005 8:23:10 AM
I have most of the Law & Order/Law&Order CI for the entire season. Are you using Tivo 2 Go? Ping me online to discuss or email me if you want to get them.
- 11
Scott Johnson | 12/24/2005 10:00:24 PM
To be a true geek, you need to check out SageTV. { Link }
Running out of recording space, add a harddrive. Back-up certain files and never worry about losing your settings. Don't like the interface, change it.
Comment in this link says swapping the drives won't work.
{ Link }
By the way, I have gotten parts for my Tivo from www.weaknees.com before. Then again, mine wasn't under warranty !