We got my parents a TiVo for Christmas. So far, hooking it up has been less than easy. They’re older, and I was hoping to get them a nice, easy way to watch TV, TiVo, and DVDs. The newest problem has me stumped.
Their TV has 2 inputs - the Coax (“antenna”) input, then the typical red-white-yellow connectors that I will call “input 1” from now on. I’m also fairly certain it has an S video input. They have cable service, but no cable box.
They have a DVD player and a TiVo. Currently I have the TiVo hooked into the Coax and the DVD in Input 1. This is less than ideal, as their TV doesn’t have an easy way to switch between coax and Input 1. The TiVo, being hooked into Coax, requires the TV channel to be on channel 3. To get to Input 1, you have to switch to channel 2, then hit the “Previous channel” button. There is no button on the TV or the Remote to easily switch from Input 1 to Antenna/Coax input.
If this was all, they could live with it. It’s clunky, but usable. However, my parents are in the habit of having 2 TVs on at once. They have a small TV in the kitchen, and the TiVo/DVD TV in the living room. The kitchen and the living room are connected, and quite often my Dad sits in the kitchen watching the small TV while my mother has the same program on in the living room. Watching live TV through the TiVo has a small delay - maybe 1/4 second or so. Enough so that the TV audio in the kitchen and the living room TV don’t match up, making it very difficult for them to watch both TVs at the same time.
I figure that I could bypass TiVo for the times this happens by hooking cable directly into the coax and allowing them to watch live TV sans TiVo for the times that both TVs are on. However, that leaves me with only “input 1” for both the TiVo and the DVD player. It doesn’t appear that you can “chain” TiVo and DVD the way you can sometimes chain a cable box and a VCR - I tried it, it doesn’t work.
So is there any way around this, other than buying a new TV - one with at least 2 inputs? Can I use the S Video input in anyway (I seem to remember problems with S Video, and have never used it much.) Help!
I think this may be a problem. The Tivo has no way to “know” what channel it’s on, it doesn’t “care”. Tivo has to use either the IR or serial port on a cable box to change channels on the box, not “within” itself.
This doesn’t’ sound right. Source? Input?
No way around that.
I use my S video cable, no problems. Are you saying that the TV is able to switch to the S video source but not the Input 1? That’s weird.
Bruce_Daddy: actually the TiVo does have a tuner in it. There’s no need for a cable box - I have 2 TiVos at home and no cable boxes, they work fine.
I ended up getting a little switch from Radio Shack. The switch allows me to hook up both the TiVo and the DVD player to the “input 1” jack. I also hooked up plain ol’ cable right from the wall to the coax so my Dad can watch TV without worrying about that new-fangled TiVo thing. That also fixes the audio sync problem.
So now my mother can watch TiVo or DVDs, and my Dad can pretend that nothing has changed on his TV. Score!
