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TiVo News Troubleshooting Help WeaKnees News

Surge in TiVo Power Supply Sales

With the amount of storms around the country at the moment, it seems that power supplies in TiVos are blowing out at a pretty swift pace. Our sales of TiVo power supplies have tripled in the last week. Thankfully, we have them for every model of TiVo ever produced, except the Toshiba SD-H400. See our TiVo power supply page for more info.

If you think your power supply may have failed, you should see our post for help diagnosing TiVo power supply issues. The short recap: no video at all, not even the gray screen, means TiVo power supply failure almost always. Even if the fan and/or hard drive still spins. 

But if you do get video out, like a gray “powering up” screen, then you likely have hard drive failure, and you need a new TiVo drive “replace” kit.

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DirecTV Product Information WeaKnees News

DirecTV Replacement Remotes

We’re now carrying several replacement DirecTV remotes.

First up, we have the standard Peanut style remote for all DirecTV TiVo users, except the SAT T-60. See our DirecTV TiVo Peanut Remote page. We’ve got the type that came with the original DirecTV TiVos, then the variety that came starting with the HDVR2 with more buttons, and, finally, the HR10-250 remotes.


For the non-TiVo HD DVRs, we have three options that work with any and all DirecTV equipment (even the TiVos, and even the SAT T-60):

RC23/RC32 – these two are essentially the same remote. They’re the standard one that comes with most plain-vanilla DirecTV receivers.

RC64 – These come with most HD DirecTV equipment, and have the Format button. They are also RF capable, so if your DirecTV receiver supports RF reception, this can be used with that. More info on another blog post.

RC64RB – The newest, latest, greatest, this has all of the functionality of the RC64, plus it’s backlit! Even for us TiVo peanut-partisans, this is a pretty nice remote.

See these last three on our DirecTV remotes page.

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DirecTV Product Information

Enabling RF with an HR20 or HR21 Remote

Switching an infrared (IR) remote to work via radio frequency (RF) has a pretty huge benefit: It’s not limited to line of site, but can go through walls, floors, cabinet doors, into closest, etc. So the receiver (in this case a DVR) doesn’t need to be sitting out roughly where the TV is.

For years, we’ve been selling an easy-to-use and inexpensive RF remote converter that takes an IR remote and basically makes it work through walls. It’s amazing.

But many newer DirecTV products, including the HR20, the HR21, and the HR21 Pro, come with remotes that can do RF, with just a configuration change. Here’s what you need to do:

Press Menu on the remote to bring up this screen:

Choose Parental, Fav’s & Setup.

Then, choose System Setup.

Navigate down to Remote, then over to IR/RF Setup.

Flip from IR to RF. Continue.

Now, you’ve set the DVR to receive via RF. Then you need to tell the remote to send in RF, and you’re all set.

Here are those directions:

  1. Press and hold MUTE and SELECT keys until a light above the mode switch on the remote flashes twice.
  2. Enter 961 using the number keys, then press CHAN UP.
  3. Enter 290314 using number keys, then press SELECT.
  4. Press SELECT on Done.

[UPDATE/EDIT: The numbers you enter will depend on the receiver identification number of your specific unit. Replace the numbers we use above with those that your receiver generates in the on-screen instructions.]

DirecTV does say you may need to do this more than once. It definitely works, but who thought of that command sequence?

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Product Information WeaKnees News

New Special: 250 GB Drives for $119

Our distributor made us a very good deal on some Seagate DB35 250GB drives, so we’re putting them in our TiVo upgrade kits at the same price as where we normally sell 160GB kits. To get this special offer, you need to order from the special on our homepage.

These kits are available for any TiVo that uses IDE (not SATA) drives, so that’s any TiVo except the TiVo HD and the TiVo Series3. One final note, these are only available as “replace” kits – not “add” kits. For more information on the differences, see our add-replace TiVo upgrade options page.

Get one while supplies last! And, yes, this deal can be combined with the current $10 off with Google Checkout.

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DirecTV Product Information

DirecTV: Slimline SWM on the Horizon

If you’re a DirecTV DVR user, you know the value of having two satellite feeds to your DVR: you can record two shows at once. The new DirecTV SWM products make wiring this a lot easier – in many cases you can just use existing cable wiring since you can send up to eight feeds through one wire with these multiswitches.

But DirecTV is testing a product that takes this one step further: a 5LNB dish with an integrated Single Wire Multiswitch. This basically puts the two products into one, and for new DirecTV installations, it should greatly simplify matters. The one caveat is that this unit won’t support any legacy products, like DirecTV TiVos.

More on this as we learn about it!