Geek Sorrow

[andrewducker]

The Tivo seems to have died. Not sure when - it was working yesterday, and today it is turning on, but there is no hard drive noise. I'll have to get some torx screwdrivers, open it up, and see if giving things a clean and prod sorts it. If not then it's time to upgrade to a TVDrive - something I'd been considering anyway, because using Telewest's Video On Demand didn't work well with the Tivo, because it expected to be able to change channel whenever it felt like it.

Tis a shame, because the Tivo interface is so nice, but it's not worth paying a load of money out again for second-hand Tivo, when I can get something reasonable for much less.

Comments

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

That sucks. I hope it's just a technological burp and it'll be fully recovered tomorrow.

TVDrive

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

In general I love it (though I've never had a TiVo to compare it with) ... in particular I love being able to record two different shows on different cable channels while either watching a third or watching something already recorded (or currently recording)

OTOH, my previous hard drive recorder had a DVD+R drive in it, and copying things off the TVDrive means playing them back at normal speed and recording them on the other box (another generation of quality drop and finding the time to do all that, and having to re-enter (by hand) the programme titles.

And at the moment my TVDrive can't be trusted to stream multiple programmes to the other drive (like picking six episodes of Have I Got News For You and telling it to copy them across ... it sometimes just freezes half way through).

And it insists on adding parental control pin numbers to items that just don't need it (like episodes of university challenge) and there's no way of switching that off ...

... oh, and it can't record radio stations ... so those I have to stream across to the other recorder if I want timed radio recordings :-(

And there's no easy way of saying "I just want to record the next five minutes of this three hour Children in Need" without going in and setting manual record times ... hitting the record button will record the rest of the show (it may be possible to cancel, but I haven't tried as I didn't want to lose what I'd taped so far)

Nevertheless, I wouldn't be without it! It's been grabbing NCIS episodes off FX and all sorts of other things I want.

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

Can the Tivo be easily fixed? My second Sky+ box died last week - was working as a normal satellite receiver but refused to allow me access to any of the PVR facilities. A quick open up and swap of HDD sorted the problem. Left me feeling extremely righteous as the Sky 'helpline' had wanted to charge me £65 for an engineer visit and a further £50 to replace the HDD - I had an old 60Gb drive lying in a box so the net cost was nil to DIY and K now has an extra 20G space to record her cartoon and kiddie crap onto!

[andrewducker]

Borrowed some Torx screwdrivers off of Roddy yesterday - I'll try to get time to open it tonight!