I have joined the Tivolution!

Zaxxon · Post by **Zaxxon** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 10:53 am

You Tivo addicts were right--this doohickey sure is cool. No more missed episodes of LOST for me! Of course now I'll likely be glued to the TV with 15 episodes of Law and Order per week available anytime I want...

Anyone have any worthwhile tips or hacks to share?

Post by **godhugh** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 11:14 am

Congrats, the Tivo will change your TV-life forever. I hate, hate, hate going to a friends house who doesn't have Tivo. It just seems so...primitive

.

Charlatan · Post by **Charlatan** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 11:29 am

Zaxxon, word to the wise.... set your Lost season pass to record 1 minute past the ending - I missed the last few secs of one episide because I foolishly thought they'd end the show right at 9 PM!

B Dog · Post by **B Dog** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 11:52 am

Here's one quickie shortcut I use all the time...

To quickly navigate the TiVo interface, hit the TiVo button and then #1 to go directly to Now Playing, #2 to go directly to your ToDo List, and so on down the main menu.

lildrgn · Post by **lildrgn** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 11:58 am

30 second skip is your friend.

Al · Post by Al » Mon Oct 18, 2004 12:11 pm

My wife, a Luddite if there ever was one, is bugging me to get a second TiVo and set up a wireless LAN in the house so we can watch TiVo in the bedroom or the living room. (Not that she knows what a wireless LAN is, she just knows that there's a way to get TiVos to share shows with each other without stringing wire all over the house.) If that's not a ringing endorsement for TiVo, I don't know what is.

Zaxxon · Post by **Zaxxon** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 1:31 pm

lildrgn wrote:30 second skip is your friend.

Awesome; I was wondering if there was a way to do this.

Vesper · Post by **Vesper** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 2:10 pm

Zaxxon wrote:You Tivo addicts were right--this doohickey sure is cool. No more missed episodes of LOST for me! Of course now I'll likely be glued to the TV with 15 episodes of Law and Order per week available anytime I want...

If you're actually taping that much Law & Order - Be warned! Tivo defaults to only saving 5 episodes of any one show. Change the season pass options to save "all episodes."

Other tips: Learn the shortcuts (hit a number from the main menu. So hit Tivo, then a number. For example, 1 is the Season Pass Manager, 2 is the To Do List, 4 is Pick a Show To Record By Name, etc).

Did you get a normal Tivo, or a DirecTivo?

Zaxxon · Post by **Zaxxon** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 2:14 pm

Vesper wrote:
Zaxxon wrote:You Tivo addicts were right--this doohickey sure is cool. No more missed episodes of LOST for me! Of course now I'll likely be glued to the TV with 15 episodes of Law and Order per week available anytime I want...
If you're actually taping that much Law & Order - Be warned! Tivo defaults to only saving 5 episodes of any one show. Change the season pass options to save "all episodes."

Actually I turned off the repeat L&O recording for now, else it'd be recording 95% of the time.

Other tips: Learn the shortcuts (hit a number from the main menu. So hit Tivo, then a number. For example, 1 is the Season Pass Manager, 2 is the To Do List, 4 is Pick a Show To Record By Name, etc).

Yep; Already starting to memorize them.

Did you get a normal Tivo, or a DirecTivo?

Normal Tivo, 80-hour (aka 35 hour at High quality). And we had a decent-sized Best Buy gift card, which when combined with the current $100 Tivo rebate and the $25 gift card we got for buying the stuff, made the 80-hour Tivo and USB wireless NIC a whopping total of $57. W00t.

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 2:17 pm

FYI As is usually with my rebates. My $100 Tivo rebate never came.

Zaxxon · Post by **Zaxxon** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 2:21 pm

LordMortis wrote:FYI As is usually with my rebates. My $100 Tivo rebate never came.

Did you ever follow up with them? I'll be damned if I'd let them get away with that.

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 2:31 pm

I call once or twice. I get the runaround. I give up. That's the way it works with every rebate.

My solution has been to never buy something with the extortion of rebate attached to it unless I was going to buy said item without the rebate attached to it anyway.

I am probably less than 50/50 on rebates being returned to me. I am so against them that I BB had two 80gig hard drives by each other side by side, same price except one had a $40 rebate assocaited with it, making is way cheap. I bought the other drive just to save myself the aggravation of having fill out the damned forms and being pissed when it doesn't ever come.

Zaxxon · Post by **Zaxxon** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 3:01 pm

I haven't really ever had trouble getting rebates, aside from the few cases where I lost some part of what I was supposed to enclose and tried to fudge it.

Anyway, Tivo has an online prequalifying and tracking center for the rebates, so hopefully I can follow its progress.

Lee · Post by **Lee** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 7:40 pm

Since Tivo requires a telephone line for inital setup and I am trying to live by cell only, I went with the cable company's DVR instead. It's pretty cool but I don't think it has many features as Tivo.

One thing is that I only get about 25 hours of recording it seems like. No where near what it sounds like you guys are getting.

Z-Corn · Post by **Z-Corn** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 7:50 pm

My tip is...buy an additional, bigger hard drive and put that sucker in there. You'll feel all |33+3 'cause not only do you have a TiVo, now you've gone and hacked your TiVo!

Check out Weaknees

You'll be able to do the hack yourself but you may want to invest in one of their most excellent 2nd HD mounting brackets.

Odin · Post by **Odin** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 8:22 pm

Great advice Z-corn. I think I had my TiVo for about a week before it was painfully clear that the stock drive was going to be inadequate. I got my pre-formatted drive from Weakness and it worked great - the only problem was that they didn't label their site well enough and I initially ordered a drive meant to replace the stock drive, rather than be added to it. A quick phone-call/e-mail cleared that up nicely.

Sith

gbasden · Post by **gbasden** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 8:28 pm

Lee wrote:Since Tivo requires a telephone line for inital setup and I am trying to live by cell only, I went with the cable company's DVR instead. It's pretty cool but I don't think it has many features as Tivo.

One thing is that I only get about 25 hours of recording it seems like. No where near what it sounds like you guys are getting.

I've got a friend with the same problem. He initially came over to my house and borrowed the phone line. After initial setup, it uses a wireless NIC to connect to his cable modem router. Works like a charm with no phone line needed.

Jeff V · Post by **Jeff V** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 9:40 pm

LordMortis wrote:I am probably less than 50/50 on rebates being returned to me. I am so against them that I BB had two 80gig hard drives by each other side by side, same price except one had a $40 rebate assocaited with it, making is way cheap. I bought the other drive just to save myself the aggravation of having fill out the damned forms and being pissed when it doesn't ever come.

I just bought a new hard drive on Saturday, asked for copies of the rebate form, and commented I still haven't received the rebate from the last HD I bought (maybe 2 months ago).

The rebate arrived today!

I don't recall ever not getting HD rebates. When I sent in the Western Digital rebate, I also sent one in the same day for Ridata DVD+R and another for a glucose meter. The one for the glucose meter arrived 2 weeks ago, the HD today, and I'm still waiting on the Ridata one.

Does TIVO still require phone lines or is it ethernet-enabled yet? If it's the former, then I'm still SOL (as if there were ever anything on that I couldn't bear to miss anyway).

gbasden · Post by **gbasden** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 9:46 pm

Jeff V wrote:
LordMortis wrote:I am probably less than 50/50 on rebates being returned to me. I am so against them that I BB had two 80gig hard drives by each other side by side, same price except one had a $40 rebate assocaited with it, making is way cheap. I bought the other drive just to save myself the aggravation of having fill out the damned forms and being pissed when it doesn't ever come.
I just bought a new hard drive on Saturday, asked for copies of the rebate form, and commented I still haven't received the rebate from the last HD I bought (maybe 2 months ago).

The rebate arrived today!

I don't recall ever not getting HD rebates. When I sent in the Western Digital rebate, I also sent one in the same day for Ridata DVD+R and another for a glucose meter. The one for the glucose meter arrived 2 weeks ago, the HD today, and I'm still waiting on the Ridata one.

Does TIVO still require phone lines or is it ethernet-enabled yet? If it's the former, then I'm still SOL (as if there were ever anything on that I couldn't bear to miss anyway).

You need access to a phone line once - when you first setup the machine. After that, it's easy to set up a USB NIC and have it do all updates wirelessly.

Teggy · Post by **Teggy** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 9:55 pm

Jeff V wrote: Does TIVO still require phone lines or is it ethernet-enabled yet? If it's the former, then I'm still SOL (as if there were ever anything on that I couldn't bear to miss anyway).

You can potentially do initial setup without a phone line if you have a wired USB ethernet adapter (not wireless).

See here Link

tivocommunity.com is of course a good site for tivo stuff in general.

Jeff V · Post by **Jeff V** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 10:05 pm

Teggy wrote:
Jeff V wrote: Does TIVO still require phone lines or is it ethernet-enabled yet? If it's the former, then I'm still SOL (as if there were ever anything on that I couldn't bear to miss anyway).
You can potentially do initial setup without a phone line if you have a wired USB ethernet adapter (not wireless).

See here Link

tivocommunity.com is of course a good site for tivo stuff in general.

Thanks, but it still looks too iffy (only some reported success). I'm still not inclined to support half-assed products that refuse to take advantage of modern communications (maybe they are sleeping with the phone company?) I guess I'll keep waiting until someone wants to sell units to people like me.

Lee · Post by **Lee** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 11:17 pm

Just get a DVR Jeff. $9.99 a month here, and why it doesn't sound as good as Tivo, tha pausing live tv and being able to record shows easily is nice.

dangerballs · Post by **dangerballs** » Tue Oct 19, 2004 12:52 am

Jeff V wrote:
Thanks, but it still looks too iffy (only some reported success). I'm still not inclined to support half-assed products that refuse to take advantage of modern communications (maybe they are sleeping with the phone company?) I guess I'll keep waiting until someone wants to sell units to people like me.

A large part of it was driver support for the early models. All new models come with the drivers for linksys wired ethernet usb adapters installed. So, if you plan on going wired then you don't need a phone line. Wireless you still need the line.

I'm still trying to train mine to suggestion good shows and not the crap it has been lately. It's getting better. I do like the trailer downloading though. Especially for ones that I missed in the theatre.

Octopus Overlords

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