Author: Jeff

I have had TiVo for over 7 years. Quite a few TiVo DVRs have been connected to my TVs over the years, including my HR10-250, which is our family’s TV workhorse.

Yesterday, for the first time in my own personal DVR history, I connected a non-TiVo DVR to a television in my home. With the impending launch of new HD stations from DIRECTV, and my own personal need to have a better understanding of DIRECTV’s HR20, I installed one yesterday.

I cannot yet comment on my experience with using this box, as I have still not recorded a single thing. (I’m bringing the box to the office today to get it upgraded.) However, I can report how surprised I was by how utterly IMPOSSIBLE it was to program the universal remote to my system. Now that I have overcome my issues, perhaps this will help someone else:

1) Don’t even TRY to program your remote to a stereo unless you have first programmed your TV into the remote. I don’t need my DIRECTV universal to program my TV. I need the remote to control the volume/mute on my stereo receiver. There are 7 codes for my stereo, but the one that seemed to work ONLY turned the thing on and off. It would not control the volume or mute! Drove me NUTS. After some web searching, I discovered that the DIRECTV remote will not allow you to program volume/mute on a stereo,unless and until you have a TV programmed in. So I programmed a random TV into my remote, and voila! the volume/mute on the stereo worked without my doing anything more.

2) You may need to download the remote’s programming manual from DIRECTV’s site. My HR20 did not come with a remote programming manual, because (in theory) the on-screen instructions are supposed to be enough. But check this out: My Samsung TV has no fewer than 24 possible codes…but on screen, it showed about 9 of them, followed by “….” and it didn’t display the rest. Maybe there is some magical way of seeing the rest of the codes on screen, but it sure wasn’t obvious to me.

So now that I have my remote programmed, I am excited to start using this thing. Rest assured, though, my HR10-250 will still have the prized spot in my entertainment cabinet, and I’m quite sure that no one else in my family will even touch DIRECTV’s HR20 for many months, if not years to come.

Seagate recently confirmed that it intends to discontinue production of IDE/PATA hard drives. If this were absolutely true, it would be BIG news for TiVo owners, the vast majority of whom have PATA drives in their DVRs. These PATA drives, as they age, are failing more and more.

As many of our customers know, TiVo owners with a failed hard drive can resurrect their DVR with a new, reliable DVR hard drivre. We have found that Seagate’s DB35 line of hard drives–which are specifically tailored for use in DVRs–are well-suited replacements. That is why it would be BIG news if these drives disappeared…and why it is big news that Seagate is letting them live, at least for now.

Seagate fully recognizes that an existing DVR, unlike a PC, cannot easily convert from a PATA to SATA hard drive. As a result, Seagate informs us that it is committed to its DB35 line of drives (PATA) at least until the end of 2008, and possibly beyond that time. We also fully expect that legacy DVRs will continue to demand PATA drives, so drive manufacturers who produce reliable drives for the DVR market will have orders to justify the continued production.

It is indeed very interesting to learn that PATA drives in PCs may start disappearing…but not so, at least for now, for the DVR aftermarket.

After a bit of a delay, we’re happy to announce that our shipment of TiVo HD boxes has arrived and we’re now shipping all units–stock and upgraded capacities.

Our upgraded units are the largest capacity boxes available anywhere, with 144 hours of HD in our 1TB units.

As always, email us with any questions.

A couple of years ago, this would not have been news, but in 2007, with DIRECTV pushing its own home-grown DVRs instead of those with the TiVo software, it truly is a surprise.

This afternoon, DIRECTV and TiVo jointly announced that DIRECTV receivers with the TiVo software will be getting a software update in early 2008 that will add some basic features that the Series2 standalone boxes have had for awhile now: Among other things, the DirecTiVos will get an “Undelete” folder (called “Recently Deleted Items”) as well as “soft padding.” (Soft padding, officially called Overlap Protection(TM), is a feature that enables you to have a scheduled recording record over the regular program by a certain period–say 5 minutes–but only if doing so does not conflict with another scheduled show.)

These new software features, in and of themselves, really aren’t a big deal. The big deal, at least from our perspective, is what this suggests about the ongoing dialog between DIRECTV and TiVo. TiVo has said repeatedly in conference calls that talks are ongoing, but here is some concrete evidence.

Some of the quotes from the short press release are particularly promising for TiVo lovers:

“It is important to us that our customers with TiVo service also have access to the latest DVR technology and we look forward to exploring additional opportunities with TiVo,” said Derek Chang, executive vice president, Content Strategy and Development for DIRECTV, Inc. (emphasis added)

And how about this: “In addition, DIRECTV and TiVo will continue to explore ways to bring future enhancements to DIRECTV customers with TiVo receivers.”

It’s anyone’s guess what, if anything, we might see next. We (and a load of our customers) would of course love to see a broader relationship that includes a DIRECTV HD DVR with TiVo (and MPEG4), not to mention TiVo to Go and the Home Media Features, but I think it would be wildly hopeful and speculative to assume any of this is coming soon, if at all. At this point, though, we’ll take what we can get. At the very least, this press release will give us something to point to when customers of ours call concerned that their DIRECTV TiVo boxes will become boat anchors in 2010. Until now, we have explained how incredibly unlikely it is that DIRECTV would drop 3 million of their most fiercely loyal customers.