another Tivo is about to die

crap!!!!!!!! I'm on my 3rd Tivo (DirecTV) and its about to die!

same thing happens every time, If the power ever goes out or it loses power it won't gome back on! It goes to the "Welcome! Powering up..." screen and the hard drive clicks and the damn thing doesn't boot. After unplugging and plugging it in again about 50 times, it eventually comes back up and works fine for a couple weeks.

Its not always the power though, sometimes it just shuts down by itself, several times its done it over race weekends and I've missed AMA/MotoGP/WSBK etc because my tivo decided to quit working over the weekend.

The last two I gave up on and threw away (waranty expired) and this one is gonna meet the same fate but I can't afford to replace these things this often (this one lasted about 8 months before it started screwing up)

pretty sure its the hard drive thats going out (sounds like its the hard drive doin the clicking sound) so I might try to get a new hard drive from one of those tivo hard drive upgrade sites. Thats assuming I don't smash the thing to bits before the day is over...

anybody else have this happen way too often and know a fix?

 

if the drive is clicking, it's likely the drive going bad. the only thing that's going to fix that for sure is a new drive. you can possibly put that drive in a PC and run spinrite on it, but that's not a sure thing.

check the forums at http://tivocommunity.com/.

 

Hey man, I'm the "nesba" guy you talked to at the honda shop a couple weeks ago. My direct tv reciever in my bedroom did the same thing a while back. After about 2 months, I had this 'crazy' idea to call the 1-800 # and just tell them that my reciever locked up for who knows why. They ran me thru tech support doing a few things and agreed it was dead. Within a week or so, I had a replacement unit sent at no charge. So, long story short, just call them; I was pleasantly surprised with the customer support.

 

if they gave him a replacement, it wouldn't be a TiVo, it'd be one of their (crap) directv branded DVRs.

 

hey Kerry, you gettin healed up?

I'll give them a call, but I'd like to salvage what I've got on that drive somehow. Did they make you send the original one back?

 

Check out the tivo website. We ended up picking up a pair of the refurb ones at $50 each. (Plus a year's commitment at12.95/month for service)

We tried the customer service replacement for an out of warrenty model....spent twice as much for an older model to be sent to us.

We figured that for $50 it was worth it.

Hijack mode: Anybody try out the enwer Tivo HD model ...around $300 range I believe? I'm wondering if it's decent and has connectivity to other series 2 models, network, etc.

 

Yeah, I'm doing a lot better than last time I saw you. Now I'm just trying to gather parts to put the rr back together again.
and yep, I did have to send the junk reciever back in the box the other one came in. (by the way, it was just a reciever, not a dvr- not sure if that matters)

 

Time to get off the TIVO and move to the open source MythTV DVR.

For less than $600 you can build a good MythTV box. The Guide is free and if something goes wrong, you can fix it yourself without some crazy operating system getting in the way.

• Step #1: Check out Mythtv.org and read up
  • Extra reading: MythTV Wiki page
• Step #2: Download a Myth Distribution with Linix. My favorite is Mythbuntu, a Ubuntu derivative for setting up a standalone MythTV
• Step #3: Build a new Myth Box
  • $150: A nice Media case
  • $150 A basic motherboard with the slowest AMD 64x Dual core CPU and 512mb RAM.
    • $50 - GIGABYTE GA-M61SME-S2 Socket AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard.
    • $65 - AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+
    • $35 - G.SKILL 512MB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800
  • $135: A Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 500 card will let you record two programs at the same time.
  • $130 buys you wireless keyboard/house, 320 gig HD, DVD Burner
    • $30: Logitech EX110 Cordless Desktop
    • $75: Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200AAKS 320GB
    • $35: ASUS 18X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe
  Go have fun, build it and free yourself from TIVO fees

 

That's exactly what happened to us! Our TIVO died when we moved a couple of years ago, and when we called customer service, they sent us one of the DirecTV DVR's. That thing is a piece of junk, and does a lot of the stuff you describe above. The catch that they don't make very apparent is that when they send you a new receiver "free of charge" is that they renew your 2 year subscription starting on the date you get the new one. Our service is up in a couple more months. I'd honestly like to go to cable or something else, but damn DirecTV actually has the most HD programming, and they have the best HD DVR package.

I set up my man pit (basement) for several televisions, but I don't want to have to pay $5 each for multiple receivers for the basement, so right now I have a splitter with a line booster put in so that all of them at least have a signal. This is the only reason why I'm considering cable.

 

• 
  
  ...it looks like a nice, fun project that still won't record HD.
  
  for that same $600, you can get a TiVoHD and pay for your next 3 years of TiVo fees.

 

I have the comcast one. It doesn't have a lot of the features of a real tivo, but when it breaks, they come and fix it for free.

 

ups? what can brown do for you?

 

For a few $$$ you can have a HD MythTV box.... Just add one of the phHDTV HD-5500 cards for $135 and you have OTA HD Myth box. My MythTV box has a HD card plus a dual tuner SD card. I can record 3 programs at one time, one HD, two SD. If I wanted I could add a 2nd HD card and record 4 programs at one time. Plus I have 2TB's of HD space to record everything, which gives me 100hrs of HD programing
Also MythTV provides me with....

• Automatic commercial skipping (Not fast forward, but detection of commercials), No adds, no fast froward, SKIPPING
• I can edit programs and save them to a DVD-R. I love helping out friends and sending off a MotoGP race.
• My TV watching data is not provided to a company to sell to someone else
• I can log into my MythTV box and add programs when I am out of town
• I can play music though my MythTV box and share photos on my HDTV.

Now before you run off and get that TivoHD you got to decide on a HD Tivo box.

• The TiVo® HD DVR gives you a whopping 20hrs of HD recording.. cost $299
• The TiVo® Series3™ HD DVR you get a healthy 32hrs of HD recording... cost $799
• BTW, 3 years of PrePaid programing is $299, and 4 years is $319.

Everyone likes something different. I personally like to build stuff
For $1100 I can build a HDTV Myth Box that...

• Records TWO HD sources at one time
• Burn HD Programing with a BlueRay burner (LITE-ON 2X Blu-ray Disc Triple DVD Burner)
• 1TB of storage space.

 

where are you getting all this HD content? OTA? that setup doesn't appear to support cablecards.

 

I pull OTA stuff, that is the only true HD signal. Cable and Satalite "Downgrade" the signal to stuff the HD signal in their bandwidth.

I have two pcHDTV HD 5500 cards - Web page

The fun specs for the HD_5500 card are:

• Supports all 18 ATSC compliant digital formats
• Supports unencrypted QAM 64 and QAM 256 Cable signals
• Supports NTSC Analog Television
• Up to 4 cards supported in a single system for recording and display of multiple programs.
• Latest LG 5th generation tuner for enhanced reception

So the card supports unencrypted cable signals, but what cable company does that

 

Holy crap, part of me is actually glad to read this...

I thought mine was the only Tivo thingy that just shuts down for zero reason and reboots itself... always at the most convenient time... It makes me feel better that the "customer service" rep who had "never heard of that before" is a complete retard and that im not crazy...

have all 3 boxes done this?

 

well, for the purposes of this argument, let's just refer to it as "better than SD" content. =)

we're really just talking about various levels of compression, anyway.

 

Try the 3-finger salute!

Hold your, "Power" and "Select" buttons on your remote while pointing it at your DVR. Then unplug the power cable to the box and immediately plug it back in. Release the buttons on the remote.

Your box should go through it's boot process then fire right up. Doing this will prevent you from losing any recordings and should keep you from having to return it.

Good luck.

 

Out of curiosity... where do you think OTA signals come from? They are carried through fiber. Which is often times microwaved into the fiber system.

Unless you have a fiber drop running to your house you have the same HD signal everyone else does. You just don't require, "thrid party" decoders to receive them (well actually you do, they're the cards you're using!).

Don't mean to rain on your parade.