If this is not the right forum, please forward it to the correct one.
I’m very much a newb at Tivo, and this is my first use of your forum. I’ve read and read, but still not quite certain what to do, what with all the converter, tuning card talk, etc. Here’s where I am so far:
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[li]I’ve bought three or so Tivos from the local charity store,[/li][li]They all work to the extent that they power up, the remotes work, and I can see recorded material on them,[/li][li]None have lifetime subscriptions, and what they did have has expired,[/li][li]They are series 1, 2 and maybe a 3.[/li][li]I’m not opposed to buying a subscription,[/li][li]If I use a cable box, will they display HDTV,[/li][li]Since these are older units, is this all I need to record movies, TV, etc?[/li][li]I would like to cut the cable if possible,[/li][li]With a subscription, will they record off the Internet using subscription information?[/li]
Oh, and if I use an antenna, will they pick up the local OTA stations? Also, I’m on Uverse.
Without a subscription, these have incredibly limited functionality. E.g., you might get 1/2 hour of saved recording time while watching live TV, if that.
The Series 1s and Series 2s are analog only and worthless without a digital converter. So you’d have to leave the TiVo on channel 3, for example, and tune using the converter box.
The 3 can get digital OTA signals and some digital cable signals with a cable card.
Here’s the real kicker: TiVo is no longer letting people start subscriptions to Series 3 and older TiVos. (Lifetime ones are grandfathered in.) So even if you wanted to pay TiVo some money, you are not going to be able to really use them for much of anything.
The thrift store made some money off you.
You might be able to resell certain parts on eBay. E.g., the remotes. If the power supply of the Series 3 is good (esp. note that all capacitors don’t bulge or leak) it’s worth a few bucks.
If you want to get a subscription free DVR, get a Magnavox DVR or some such.
If you want to buy a used TiVo, stick with Series 4 (Premieres) or later. And get a lifetime unit while you’re at it.
Buying a used TiVo is not a good idea. The hard drives in them inevitably wear out after 5-6 years at the most. More importantly, brand new TiVo boxes are not expensive. Last year my TiVo Series 3 HD started to die (the hard drive starting failing). I’ve built PCs so I considered just buying a new hard disk and installing it myself. But I checked TiVo’s website and I was able to purchase their latest box at the time, the TiVo Roamio, for less money then the price of a similar size bare hard disk, about $125 (with a 2-year commitment for around $20/month).
I don’t know how much the used boxes cost, but I doubt it was very much (hope not). Only a Series 3 or newer TiVo box is capable of using either a digital TV signal (which is all there is now) or high definition. A Series 3 will accept a CableCARD which you rent from your cable company (instead of another cablebox). But again, Series 3’s are pretty old now and their hard drives aren’t likely to last too long (and according to the above, TiVo is no longer activating them anyway).
And in regards to purchasing TiVo’s Lifetime Subscriptions with a new box (I guess they call it the ‘All-In’ plan now), they really aren’t worth it in the long run. The subscription is for the device’s lifetime, not yours, and as I said hard drives in DVRs are in constant heavy use and simply wear out sooner than in a computer. Plus, like computers, TiVo box features (recording capacity, user interface, CPU speed, internet connectivity etc.) are upgraded every few years so you don’t really want to lock yourself into one box. Economically you’re better off sticking with a month-to-month subscription.
A word of caution about this: If you’re not electronically savvy be very careful trying to do this. The power supplies in TiVo boxes are not contained in a separate case like in a PC, and if you touch parts of them you can get a serious shock*!*
Of course also check out TiVo.com itself. If you want to ‘cut the cable cord’ a TiVo Roamio or, even more, the newest TiVo Bolt is a good choice as it’s designed specifically for that.
Thanks for getting back so quickly guys. I appreciate you input.
Yeah, they cost about ten bucks each- not enough to hurt.
So it sounds like the best that I could hope for would be that the series 3 could be equipped with a cable card, but then without a subscription, I wouldn’t be any better off.
I’m not a coder, but I do design electronic hardware, so making mods wouldn’t be that much of a problem, but for HDDs, etc, the Linux commands would be a problem, unless there were step be step instructions.
I think I may shop for later model boxes, or just forget it.
Thanks again guys. I appreciate your help and insight.
The HDs aren’t the weakest link in TiVo’s. It’s the power supplies. I’ve upgraded the HDs in 2 of the 3 TiVos I owned to larger sizes. (The third is already 1TB.) Not a big deal if you know how to properly deal with HD management software. Lots of info at the unofficial tivocommunity forums. (There’s official forums on TiVo’s website but they aren’t particularly useful. What a surprise.)
As noted previously, having a CableCARD of your own usually doesn’t ease things with your cable company. Some companies are even regionally schizophrenic in this regard. Allowing customers in a few areas to use their own but not in most other areas.
Another TiVo forum is out of dealdatabase.com for people with more advanced interests in modding TiVos, but it’s moribund. The protection measures in Series 4 and higher seems to have blocked the most die-hard modders. (People who replace ROMs and such.)
TiVo’s use free Linux software but blocks owners from accessing their own devices. Something called Tivoization (sic) by the community. The GNU General Public License version 3 specifically added language to stop this, but almost everything is GLPv2 so it doesn’t matter.
That’s the default for most non-TiVo DVRs. Since cable DVRs require a CableCARD and that’s a pain for manufacturers to deal with, they prefer OTA only. TiVo itself also makes a cheaper DVR for OTA only because of this.
Although I referred to it as ‘official’, the tivocommunity.com site & forum is not owned or operated by TiVo itself, it is an independent entity.
I haven’t been active in the tivocommunity.com forum for years now. TiVo originally released software, TiVo Desktop, which let you transfer recordings off your TiVo and onto your PC. Although the forum is not owned by TiVo, TiVo’s attitude was generally supportive. Actual TiVo-employed techs would frequent it and answer questions. They knew it only represented a tiny niche of power users, but as long as you didn’t discuss digital data extraction (decrypting the actual .mpeg program files stored on the hard drive) or trying to hack a free subscription to the service they didn’t care.
Originally the TiVo Desktop software could transfer any program from your TiVo, but eventually content providers caught on. They started setting the ‘copy bit’ in a lot of programs to prevent this. Eventually TiVo stopped supporting the TiVo Desktop app altogether. It still works (I can currently use it with Win10) but it hasn’t been updated in years. There are a number of less user-friendly homemade apps that can transfer stuff too (although not if the copy bit is set) but as content has become ubiquitously available (streaming, YouTube etc.) transferring & burning programs to DVD has become kind of obsolete.
If you find more at thrift stores, you can call Tivo and give them the serial number and they can tell you if it has lifetime. Or hook it up to a TV there and see if it says it has lifetime. Another good place to check is Craigslist. Sometimes you’ll find one with lifetime service.
It’s not really worth buying a used Tivo if it doesn’t have lifetime, since you can get a new one pretty cheaply.
Regarding TiVo Desktop: It is being updated. The paid version only. The free version has been tossed into the bit bucket.
This is due to codecs issues. The paid version does some format conversions. To use the codecs for this, TiVo has to pay someone so they have to charge users. With the addition of MPEG4 to cable, that’s another headache. So they dropped support for the free version.
I use something called Archivo* to transfer stuff from my TiVos. It handles the MPEG4 stuff fine. I still use the old TiVo Desktop to transfer stuff to the TiVos (all MPEG2 format).
The copy-protect bit is a pain. It affects pay channels like HBO and s couple other movie channels. But sometimes its off for a few weeks and it’s download time. Not that there isn’t a simple way around the copy protection stuff anyway.
(Sorry to make another post in a row. But this one is completely unrelated to the previous one.)
Another option for an OTA DVR is to do-it-yourself. I’ve done this recently just for fun. (?)
I had a spare tuner/capture card, an antenna in the attic, etc. So I put the card in my server in the basement, plugged in the antenna (with a pre-amp) and installed NextPVR.
I got quite a few channels but the quality sucked. (Later I replaced the pre-amp and balun and things are mostly okay … ish.) YMMV
It’s the software configuration and such that’s a pain. This isn’t for complete computer-TV novices.
As to program-info (EPG) there’s three options. 1. Info from the data component of the channel, but that’s limited if present at all. 2. Pay Schedules Direct for the info. But that’s $. 3. Use a script and a “scrapper” to get the info off a free site. I did this. Requires even more background knowledge. But I already had experience with this from when I used my thrift store ReplayTV as a secondary DVR. (ReplayTV’s later owner set up a thing where you could lifetime yours for free. But sans EPG.)
To control and watch it I use the NextPVR plug-in to Kodi running on my Amazon Fire TV stick. (You can also use a PC, etc.) Ran into a problem: The version of Kodi I had (14) didn’t allow pause/FF/etc. Upgrading to Kodi 16 fixed that. But it caused problems with watching other stuff. Roll back.
While it is doable, it isn’t for everyone.
(There are also boxes that do the tuning/recording stuff. But you still need a PC or something to store the programs on, watch them, etc. These go well with Windows Media Center which is uh, er, um, less than current.)
Thanks for the heads-up about Archivo, works well. I’ve only used older ones, kmttg and TiVo PlayList. They both work ok but are not very polished or user friendly.
Nevermind, I found some info regarding the last thing you mentioned…
Ok nevermind the nevermind. Is there a site with info regarding transferring ‘special’ files? Does it involve connecting to the TiVo itself and using Bash prompt commands? If so, that’s too involved…
Converting .tivo files to regular .mpg I know how to do. There have been freeware programs for this for a while. I’ve read that the .tivo format is just a ‘wrapper’ and not really encryption anyway. But as far as I know there isn’t any way to transfer the ‘red circle’ files off a TiVo…
Yes. 2.8.3. I’ve been using that version for years.
What kind of special files? I don’t have any problems transferring all sort of video files from my PC to my TiVo. It’s been a while since I’ve done it the other way around though.
I was referring to this in my above posts. Be able to transfer red circled files from a TiVo to a PC. Near as I can tell there’s no easy (or any) way to do it.
I transfer red-circle programs off my TiVos from time-to-time. The HDCP is ignored by certain splitters sold on Amazon and eBay. (This means there’s a decode-encode cycle, of course.)
As to .tivo/.TiVo files (which are just special format MPEG2 or MPEG4 files), the program I used to use: tivodecode doesn’t handle the newer stuff. I use VideoRedo. While a pay program it does a lot of stuff. Makes it easy to edit out commercials and save to a plain format (or convert if you want).
If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty of lots of video stuff, AVS Forums is the place to go.
Ok, I figured it had to be a hardware solution. I was mostly just curious how/if it could be done, like I said before I don’t transfer much stuff at all anymore. When I do I still use Tivo Decoder to convert the .tivo files but you’re right, it doesn’t always work.
One column that covers various video products is Zatz Not Funny!
It’s pretty good but it doesn’t update very often so I only check it once in a while. Which is why I didn’t notice a post last month covering TiVo’s cancellation of “lifetime” EPG for Series 1 TiVos. Apparently “lifetime” means ending Sep. 29th.
They’re giving owners a $75 rebate and a discount on a new TiVo. Which would be fair except for the “lifetime” part.
When TiVo pulled out of the UK, they gave out “the keys to the kingdom” for the programming guide. I.e., the security codes needed to generate EPGs that passed the UK TiVo’s crypto check. Some people got together and put up a site that scraped program sources and generated valid EPGs. I think this might have happened in Australia, too.
It’d be nice if they did that here when they un-lifetime a product.
One of the reasons TiVo is doing this is they are switching sources for their guide information. Not sure why this makes a difference. But they didn’t want to bother for the small number of Series 1 users.
Expect something like this to happen to Series 2 soonish. Both are analog boxes. Series 3 and later have better chances of hanging on as they are digital.
