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Is there any kind of self-diagnostics I can do on my Multi CableCard? It's been acting up the last few days (sometimes not wanting to record channels, and weirdly, when I go to its channel list, it only shows 550-553 - porn channels that I don't get), and now my cable is entirely out. Sigh.
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Jan 28, 2009 05:53
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Adding a season pass to my TiVo HD (with about 45 passes on it) is pretty quick. Where the big slowdown happens is when I move a season pass around on the schedule. Like if I move #45 to #1, that can take a few minutes while it recalculates all the priorities.
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Mar 28, 2009 19:52
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First of all, Dogen, thanks for m.tivo.com, that's a great lean interface. However, an unrelated question. My CableCard stopped working overnight. I call, they schedule a service call for Wednesday, which is bullshit, so I figure, I've got nothing to lose, and pull out the card. It's hot. Too hot to hold. So I let it cool for 20 minutes, pop it back in, and it's fine. We had a storm last night, I was wondering if that had fritzed it or something, who knows. My question - should I keep the service call, or just wait until/if it dies again?
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Jun 1, 2009 18:31
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My TiVo (purchased refurbished from Woot last year) has been having a rough summer. I don't know if it's the new TV stand we put it in, or if it's because it's on top of the DVD player now and not the other way around, but it's been freezing a lot. Maybe once every other day. I just loaded up the system info and it says it's running 65-66C, "hot but still safe". I'm about to get some compressed air to see if I can blast any dust out of it (this area seems notoriously dusty), but any ideas? Stick a fan back there? Think it might just be the fact that things are hot for a few months and it'll be better when the ambient temperature drops back below 80? Incidentally, the CableCard hasn't had any further problems after the one I mentioned above. Edit: Also, just today, when I finish a program and want to delete it, it's been taking up to 3-5 minutes for the delete menu to even come up. Edit again: Disassembled the TiVo to get out any dust; the drat thing is 100% dust *free*. However, while I was in there, I noticed that, even though the TiVo had been off for 15 minutes, the hard drive was still nearly too hot to touch. This worries me. Is it possible to swap in a hard drive? Golbez fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Jun 29, 2009 |
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Jun 28, 2009 23:26
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Thanks for the guide. Seems engineered to increasing capacity but since I already have an external drive for the TiVo, I'll be happy just replacing the drive rather than embiggening it. I *could* get a bigger one, but ... I have the external and I don't want to feel like I wasted it, and right now we're running typically at 120-140 shows in the deleted folder, which is how I judge how much space is left.
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Jun 29, 2009 15:30
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chemosh6969 posted:FYI: If you external drive ever dies, you're going to lose your shows because it splits each recording across both drives. If my internal dies, I lose the shows too. It's just that the internal is giving me warning ahead of time. Incidentally, the problem I had with the delete screen taking minutes to come up seems to have disappeared, and so far as I know it hasn't crashed in a couple of days. Though it's reporting a temp of 69C. An entirely different question: What is the use of Standby? I hit it out of curiosity and it seemed to still record my program, it just wasn't broadcasting it to the TV.
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Jun 29, 2009 22:54
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OK, so it's still crashing randomly, mostly during saved playback, and one file in particular seems to hate it; every time I hit the 14 minute mark or so on last week's episode of Wipeout, the system freezes and reboots. So three questions: I've been assuming the problem is with the TiVo drive, since that's been the hot one, but is there any way to tell what drive(s) a file is being stored on? And perhaps is there a way to tell the drive to mark these particular sectors as bad? (Apart from keeping Wipeout there forever) I'm not entirely sure while reading the upgrade guide, but is it required to have a valid TiVo drive before the upgrade, or does it generate one completely? That is to say, do I need a hard drive with the OS, etc. installed on it before attempting the upgrade? If so then I guess I should get to this sooner rather than later. 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.
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Jul 4, 2009 19:45
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Lazlo Nibble posted: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...) 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. Qwijib0 - thank you so much for that link, I'll run that.
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Jul 5, 2009 01:34
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I just tried running Kickstart 54. After getting to 50% done on the short test, the secondary drive says "No start", and the test freezes as a whole at 80% done on the primary drive, 1 minute 51 seconds elapsed. So apparently even the test is killing my TiVo.
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Jul 5, 2009 01:55
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Lazlo Nibble posted: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. I wasn't going to replace it.  Remove internal, put external into internal, and voila. I get less space but eh. Maybe I should just abandon the external.Yeah, I was going to code 54 the primary drive with the secondary unplugged but that's not working, it just brings up the "your external drive is unplugged" screen. So the next step is to hook them up to the PC and see what's what. Edit: Apparently I'm not supposed to run the SMART test from the main menu. Going to the hard drives individually gives SMART codes that indicate no problems, and the first hard drive passed. The second one, however, did not - the TiVo rebooted mid-test. So the internal drive is running hot, but hda (which I've been assuming is the internal) passed all tests. hdb broke the TiVo. Edit again: hda is definitely the internal, it's a WDC1600, 160 gig, hdb is a WDC5000, 500 gig. So the question is: If the internal is running hot but the external has the problems... hrm. Golbez fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Jul 5, 2009 |
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Jul 5, 2009 17:45
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OK, so to summarize: Even though my refurbished, out-of-warranty TiVo has been running hot and the internal HDD seemed way too hot, all tests indicate the flaws are on the *external* drive. And *that* drive is under warranty. Until July 17. So I have about a week to decide whether or not I want to ship this off to WD. So, I guess the questions are: Should I just do it? Should I run an extended test first to have it mark the sectors bad? The drat thing can't even survive a basic read/write test, yet it reports all-clear on the SMART test.
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Jul 5, 2009 18:19
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chemosh6969 posted:Like I said earlier, all files get split between the internal and external drive. Actually, it's everything that gets recorded after the external drive is hooked up is split between the drives. 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)
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Jul 5, 2009 18:41
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Lazlo Nibble posted: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. Thanks for the link; it doesn't look like any guidelines will let me use my external if I upgrade the internal (I have a TivoHD, not a series 3, which bums me out because the front panel of the series 3 looks sweet; I'd love to have a clock on my Tivo, and it tell me what's being recorded.) Oh, wait: "You can still add an eSATA drive to an upgraded TiVo, but doing so requires you to open the box and void the warranty. " Since that warranty is dead, no problem.
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Jul 6, 2009 02:23
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So my current plan is: 1) Send back the external WD drive (hooray for being on week 50 of the warranty) 2) Image the internal drive 3) Try to live with the stunted space 3a) If not, get a new hard drive and install that 4) Enjoy more space when the WD returns Of course, #4 assuming that WD finds a problem with the drive. I note again that it returns a healthy SMART report. And I can't plug it in to my computer to test directly because I don't have the kind of port it wants, and to open it up would... invalidate my 12-day-left warranty. So I have to throw a hail mary on this one.
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Jul 6, 2009 02:53
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chemosh6969 posted:Not sure what guides you've read, but I've seen the option to backup shows and important stuff or everything, so you don't need to delete any shows. Since I'm unhooking the external drive, the shows will be deleted anyway. Edit: I couldn't have done anything this weekend anyway but I wonder if I waited too long; the drat thing won't even start now. Trying without external drive attached... whew, okay, that works, that makes me feel better. Was hoping to be able to transfer more off the TiVo before removing the external but apparently copying the files is making it crash, so. Oh well. Golbez fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Jul 6, 2009 |
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Jul 6, 2009 05:03
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Nothing wrong with broadcast; from what I understand, OTA HD is higher quality than any other method. Of course, the selection's limited... Mine's set to 1080i fixed, I don't know if I've experienced any video quality issues on the 720p stations... checking which ones those are... ABC, Fox, and ESPN. 1080i is used by CBS, NBC, HBO, and Discovery. Hm. Maybe I should try switching it around and see how things are. Though I gotta say, it is pretty annoying to have my TV search for signal every time I switch between HD and SD. Ew, and between NBC and ABC, as well. (Ironically, both my HD NBC and HD ABC are currently showing syndicated SD shows right now) I think I'll switch to 720p for a while and see if I notice a difference. Also, an update on my HDD problems - Western Digital is possibly the most professional computer hardware company I've dealt with, and it feels weird saying that. They got my warranty updated and are sending out a new drive. No matter how warm the TiVo and its internal drive get, all signs point to the external as the point of failure. The internal has passed every test I've sent to it so far in code 54; the external fails without exception (except, of course, the SMART report)
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Jul 10, 2009 21:47
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KickStand posted:I'm running at 720p fixed. Ive found on a lot of the other settings that I get display issues with my receiver (blank screen every so often). I was also getting issues where I would have audio and no video for about 15 seconds before it kicked in and the tivo menu would take forever to load. I would guess there's no point, since TV isn't broadcast in any form in 1080p, so you're spending computer cycles for not much real benefit. (The only broadcast in 1080p that I'm aware of is on-demand movies from DirecTV, and there's not much point in using a TiVo for that)
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Jul 10, 2009 22:25
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I got my replacement expansion drive! I untether the old one from the TiVo, boot it up clean, shut it down, add the new one... "We've detected a new drive! Would you like to set it up now?" Yes! ... "This device is unsupported and may not be set up with your TiVo HD DVR." So who do I complain to about this? TiVo or Western Digital?  Edit: Western Digital. I hooked up the old external drive and it supports it just fine. Bloody hell. At least I'm glad I got the advance shipping so I didn't have to send my drive back first; if I had, I'd've had no way of proving it was the new drive's fault and not the TiVo's. Golbez fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Jul 17, 2009 |
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Jul 16, 2009 23:49
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complex posted:Did they send you the non-Tivo version? If so then that is really annoying. What is the model number of your replacement drive? Exactly the same as the one I have. Even has a 'TiVo Verified' sticker on the back. The nice chap in India upgraded me to 'level 2' support, which means being transferred to an idiot in the US who suggests I call my cable company and ask if this hard drive is supported. He also told me to call TiVo to make sure I have any recent firmware update that could make it support my drive better. How about I not call, but say I did. I would have just RMA'd this if it weren't, y'know, an RMA already. So I'm not sure where to progress on my own with this. In the meantime they still want the original drive back by August 6 or I get charged $165, but I'm definitely not letting go of it since it's my only way to compare with new drives. Edit: The nice Indian chap is sending a new one out to me, at which point I send out the old two ones. Golbez fucked around with this message at 14:23 on Jul 18, 2009 |
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Jul 17, 2009 05:06
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The second new drive arrives tomorrow. I'm kind of happy I had to spend this time without a drive hooked up; it's made it abundantly clear the problem was on the external drive. I have had only a single crash since unplugging the external, and it wasn't during playback, but rather when I did something I guess confused the UI. This compared to when pretty much every video would cause a consistent crash at some point in the recording.
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Jul 23, 2009 21:18
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Lazlo Nibble posted: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. I've had it crash a handful of times (but only a handful) when, for example, hitting rewind immediately after hitting pause, but that one's only happened a couple of times. It tends to happen when I give it multiple commands too fast, but again only rarely. Since it's a refurb, I'm stuck with it. But having that single crash in the last week is about three dozen fewer crashes than I expected.
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Jul 24, 2009 20:18
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Sigh. So the third drive (second replacement drive) arrived today. It's a My Book. A 2TB My Book World Edition Network Hard Drive. The loving thing doesn't even have an eSATA port.
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Jul 24, 2009 22:44
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The fourth drive works. Now to send back the first three. I've missed you, extra storage Formula 1 takes up 9 hours a weekend, so without the extra storage, that's nearly half of my space right there, unless I babysit it and delete them as they record.
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Jul 30, 2009 00:25
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qirex posted:I have a stock Tivo HD and I never run out of stuff to watch. I've thought about upgrading the drive or getting an expander but I can't watch enough television for that to make sense, especially with Netflix streaming too. The main reason to have a big drive isn't day-to-day, it's when you go on vacation. I like being able to go on a trip for 5 days and not have to meticulously examine the To Do list to make sure only the important things get recorded and don't get drowned out by the day-to-day stuff. It was really bad when we had to take a trip during the 2nd week of the Olympics - no extra drive, and we'd just gotten HDTV, so we could record maybe, what, 20 hours of HD material? And in the end, it was all for naught; the TiVo crashed 36 hours after we left. (It's crashed 3 out of the 4 big trips we've taken; it's like it knows when it's alone and throws a fit. Unplugging the TV might have jostled the power cord, though...) So, the benefit of more storage is peace of mind - I really can abandon it for a week and not have stuff be deleted automatically.
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Oct 5, 2009 23:39
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I can only really answer #4, and Youtube works great, except for the sluggishness of the interface. The advanced interface, used for youtube and the new TiVo Search and extra program information, is slow as hell, and really turns me off from using it. But once you're past that, the Youtube quality and ease is fine.
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Oct 14, 2009 07:08
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brc64 posted:I don't remember if it was covered earlier (or if I already asked it), but is Tivo smart enough to handle situations where a tv show starts late due to a sporting event? I deal with this with The Amazing Race every other week or so. I have it padded by an hour, then, if I'm around, I always turn it on when it starts to see if 60 minutes (the hour-long program preceeding TAR) is on. If it's not, then I know I need to add more padding. If you can't be around to verify then add another hour to it, if possible.
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Oct 27, 2009 22:38
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Just an additional comment on the utility of the addon drive: The girlfriend is out of town for ten days. She's been gone for 7, with 3 remaining. I haven't deleted any program we watch together in that time, which can be several hours of HD a day. Yet we still have 150+ in our deleted folder (the only metric for seeing how much space is left) So, the addon drive gives you peace of mind. I really can just leave it for a week and not lose anything, whereas without it, I'd be constantly babying it, making sure to keep certain things, cancel certain recordings, etc. When we leave for another week-long trip in a month, it'll be nice to know that, barring my Tivo's temperament, everything we miss will be recorded.
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Oct 30, 2009 02:21
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Captain Haddock posted:So over the past few months my HD Tivo has been randomly restarting itself. This seems to happen at random times, and occurs every couple of weeks or so. Has this happened to anyone else? It's loving annoying when I'm in the middle of a show and it has to go through the 5+ minute startup cycle. I had a problem with this, you can see my saga a few pages back. Be sure to run the diagnostic on your internal (and external, if you have one) drive. For a Tivo HD: 1) Restart the TiVo 2) As it reboots (I could never remember the exact moment to do it; try different ones) start holding PAUSE while aiming at the TiVo. 3) Hold it down until the lights on the front of the unit do weird stuff. "For TiVoHD users: you'll see a flashing green light, then amber and red lights." 4) Now enter "54". I don't recall if you need to hit enter or not. A screen will come up with various HDD diagnostics. Check the SMART tests, and check the specific tests for each drive you have. I don't know about the long ones, the site linked recommends the overnight, but if the short ones report errors then you know what you're dealing with. Site with the code information: http://www.weaknees.com/tivo-kickstart-codes.php
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Nov 8, 2009 11:30
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I've made this no secret: The biggest upgrade TiVo could make is to the interface. I don't care how many secondary sources they add; if it takes me 2 minutes just to navigate the screens to enter a name of a youtube video, I'm just going to go to my computer and type it. This isn't about using the remote as a keyboard, either; it takes seconds just to switch between options and letters. So yes, faster processor would be grand. For this, and for an HD guide.
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Nov 11, 2009 22:24
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smackfu posted:No, not that urgent. I really just wish Amazon had them in stock. Definitely. However, the random HD stuff on the Tivo HD makes sense: everything that's HD was patched in. The basic interface is normal, but Youtube, TiVo Search, the fancy new information screen, etc. were all added after release. So they've used a slow HD system for the new stuff but haven't changed the old stuff. Much of the time it's easier to use the web interface for a lot of things now. I understand some of that they can't change without putting a keyboard on the remote, but the speed problems are definitely fixable. Hopefully they're just working on a blockbuster new interface but I somehow doubt it.
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Dec 7, 2009 18:02
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Sigh. The TiVo's been crashing a lot lately. (Note to anyone getting one: Mine's a refurb, so your performance will likely be much better.) It tends to hate it when we go on vacation but lasted the full 8 days before crashing the night before we got back... and since then, it's been going down maybe once every two days. Usually when accessing a menu. Last night, I went to a menu, and it took a long time to come up... I could hear the TiVo processing from across the room. After 30 seconds, it came up like nothing was wrong. But most times, like just now, it just resets. Any ideas? This has all been since we closed the windows for winter, and our TiVo has always been a bit temperamental to environmental conditions... hrm.
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Dec 12, 2009 15:59
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chemosh6969 posted:Dying hard drive? We had a dying expansion drive which would drop when recording or playing back corrupted files... this is different, it's mostly on menus or while actively using the thing. Could still be a dying hard drive, just the corrupted sectors are on system files rather than data. I'll run a smart test the next time it dies.
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Dec 12, 2009 17:07
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I ran some smart and HDD tests through the TiVo and everything comes up fine. So it appears to not be a hard drive problem, on either drive. Any suggestions?
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Dec 17, 2009 15:50
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It seems to crash more often when starting or stopping a recording, or doing anything pertaining to the menu. The hard drive tests check out; could this be a weird software issue? Is it possible to initialize the system without losing my recordings? I'll do it if I have to, if anyone thinks that would work. I guess the question is, is it possible to make the TiVo redownload its system?
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Dec 24, 2009 18:11
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That would be the best thing possible. They have a reasonably powerful computer in there, obviously one that can encode HD 720p/1080i in real time. They can spare a few hertz for an updated UI. On my home front, the TiVo has started crashing far less. Couldn't tell you why. It's gone from 2-3 times a day to once 4 days ago, and once 3 days before that.
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Dec 31, 2009 10:03
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bull3964 posted:That's not how Tivo works. It takes the MPEG2 transport stream and writes it directly to the hard drive. It doesn't do any encoding of HD material. The only encoding it does is SD analog stuff.
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Jan 1, 2010 18:24
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haveblue posted:True uncompressed HD video consumes hundreds of megabytes per second and can only be handled on serious workstations with huge RAID setups. Even within real editing rooms much of the work is done with media that's been compressed in some way just for logistics (and because the computer can re-apply the edits to the uncompressed version later automatically). And I obviously misunderstood; bull said it takes the MPEG2 transport stream and writes that to disk, I still had it in my mind that cables transport free unencoded bytes, but obviously that's not how things are done. So it simply doesn't re-encode the stream that's coming down the pipe.
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Jan 1, 2010 19:02
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bull3964 posted:Ok, Tivo, you REALLY need to make a good hardware announcement at CES this year. So far we've had a bunch of announcements for various cheap nettops and we've had two cablecard announcements. The first was for a quad tuner cablecard tuner from Ceton and the second was this morning for a network enabled dual cablecard tuner for $250 from HDHomeRun. Either one would make putting together a Windows Meda 7 based DVR solution a cinch for not much of a price premium over your offerings. This is especially true when you factor in no service cost. Are there any free TV listing services available that PVR software can use? I thought the last one finally gave up the ghost, since it's an expensive thing to maintain.
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Jan 7, 2010 18:18
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After 3 weeks of uptime, the TiVo's gotten temperamental again, crashing 3 times in the last 24 hours. I am so tired of this. I'd buy a new one if I could, but I cannot. Also, I'd prefer to wait for Premiere or whatever that will be.
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Jan 19, 2010 04:23
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The TiVo, again after being fine for weeks, started crashing every 30 minutes. I left it unplugged all night, popped it back on, same problem, even down to 10 minutes. Then it got stuck rebooting, so I guess it's down to zero minutes. Took out the CableCard. TiVo comes up fine. Working fine, sans HD of course, but still. Hopeing that's the problem. Just a note for folks to check their CableCard if their TiVo seems to be going on the fritz. Edit: I put the CableCard back in and it was running fine for 45 minutes until I had the audacity to hit the Tivo button.
Golbez fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Jan 20, 2010 |
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Jan 20, 2010 00:04
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