TiVo Series 3 - "Official" Thread - Page 196

Call TiVo. It shouldn't take that long.

If it's a new Tivo, you should have a seven day trial period on the Tivo before you have to activate. Have you run guided setup?

Every new TiVo includes 7-day trial, which includes all functionality aside from the network features (like the ability to download recordings).

If you purchased a TiVo from someone else, you'll need to be sure and run through guided setup. Through guided setup, you tell the TiVo what area you live in, whether you are using OTA or cable, etc.

Posted this in the TivoHD thread, but it's relevant here too.

For those on or coming off 3yr/$299 subscriptions, TiVo is apparently allowing an upgrade to lifetime service for $99.

Wow! I don't suppose they'll do that retroactively, having just purchased a lifetime back in Sept?

Thanks for the tip--my S3 is just coming off a 3 year plan, so hopefully it will apply (they haven't charged me my first month-to-month fee yet--when I log in it says "we're still processing your activation, check again in 24 hours"). I'll call first thing tomorrow .

I wasn't even considering lifetime or even another 3 year, since it seems highly likely I'll dump it for something else before then.

Wow...that would be great. I was wondering what I would do in June. I was seriously considering the Moxi. I hope they offer me this.

I received the $99 offer in my InBox on Feb 4 and jumped on it. I was also coming off of my initial 3-year prepaid plan, and it was a very nice surprised to be able to grab lifetime for such a low price.

How long is it before the expiration of your pre-pay, Paul?

It had already expired on Jan 1, so I was going month-to-month. Wasn't ready to pony up the $299 or $399 that TiVo was listing for the normal Lifetime package, so I was biding my time, trying to figure out what to do with my S3. My lifetime now kicks in on March 1, which is my next billing cycle.

Why not just call and buy it now? What's the difference between letting you prepaid service run out in June and converting then and converting to lifetime now? bfdtv's post said that the offer expires at the end of April.

I made the call and got the deal. They'd unfortunately already converted me to month-to-month and charged the $12.95 yesterday, so I won't be charged for it until my current month's service expires on March 7th (you'd think that they might just apply my current service fees and charge me $87, but no such luck ). On the "Manage My Acccount" page under "Future payment plan" it now reads:

Scheduled plan: $99 Product Lifetime serice

So bicker1 if you ask for the deal now they'll charge you for it at the end of your prepaid plan.

The offer that I got in e-mail read (it came with the notification of my prepaid plans emminent expiration):

That seems to say that I'd get $100 off an upgrade to PLS, which'd still leave $200 given the upgrade options I was offered before; I'd have jumped on it if it were clear that it'd be $99. Whatever--I got the upgrade .

I actually got both of these emails. The first one was for a $100 discount off of the existing lifetime price. The second one was for $100 lifetime. I'm very thankful I waited long enough to get the 2nd mail.

It looks like existing TiVo monthly/yearly subscribers may be able to add lifetime for $299 using the PLSR promotion code.

bfdtv's post also indicated that

Quote:

Originally Posted by bfdtv

Only valid for:
TSN: xxxxxxxxxx

That makes it sound like you need to receive the email to be eligible.

I have had problems for a long time with my Tivo 3 remote, is it normal for it to work intermittently, or for buttons to act like you pressed them twice, when you pressed them once (like using the up/down arrowed to go through the now playing list)? Now it's not working at all.... good thing I have my Series 1 remote..... Also, where can I get a Tivo 3 remote theses days? Thanks!

This is normal when the battery gets low.

If you use the GLO (backlight) feature on the Series3 remote, the batteries will only last 2-4 months. If you turn off the backlight, the batteries will last 6-9 months or longer.

I did not receive the e-mail. I got an offer for $100 off lifetime in the notification that my prepaid plan was expiring. I saw bfdtv's post on the day that my plan expired and called them the day after. The girl asked me if I'd received the e-mail, I told her no, then she went away for a minute and came back and told me that she could give me the deal. They'd already charged $12.95 for February, so they'll charge me the $99 on March 7th.

Your only problem is that your plan expires at some point in June and the deal ends at the end of April. They seem to be making an attempt to offer a great deal on lifetime to people who bought a Series3 soon after it came out and bought a 3-year prepaid plan because lifetime wasn't on offer then. This way we'll essentially have paid $400 for lifetime (well, I'll have paid $412.95 ). I don't know but some people at TCF say that it was months after the end of April 2007 before lifetime came back, so they're cutting the offer off a little too soon.

Some folks over in TCF think that they should offer the deal to people who bought a TiVo and took a 3-year service commitment 3 years ago, getting a reduced monthly fee (I never saw that offer or I might have taken it). People have tried, but no one who had the commitment plan has reported that they managed to talk them into it.

Ok, how do you turn off the back light? 2-4 months? 2 months maybe...

I just noticed recently that lifetime is back, but according to the Tivo site, they want another $299! I paid $299 when I purchased by Tivo3 (and I do not remember how long ago that was).... How can I get lifetime cheaper? I would have chosen lifetime if it was available when I purchased my Tivo3...

Go back and look at this post; it's the first mention of the $99 PLS upgrade offer.

It's for people with 3-year prepaid service plans which expire before April 30th. If your plan expires after that date you may have trouble getting it. If it expired before that date, probably not (there's a guy in the thread at TCF who said that his plan expired in January and they gave it to him.

Okay... I'm not expiring for another four months, so it's still a little early for me to receive that notification.


Great to know. I'm really busy right now, but I'll give them a call next week. Thanks.


Yeah, so I might be out of luck... that would suck.

About a month ago, I started to have all the problems listed on bfdtv's FAQ Known Problems #8 and #9 (partial recording, lose of audio, pixelization, slow remote response). My TiVo series 3 was purchaged in October 2006 and the 500GB drive expansion was added about 2 years ago. First I thought it was a problem with my Comcast signal (which I had previously with them about two years ago) but the degradation on the remote response made me to think the issue may actually be with my TiVo. Needless to say I was very upset as the football season moved towards its playoff games and I ended up watching most of the games on SD (sigh).

After going over the excellent FAQ organized by bfdtv, I have just replaced the TiVo's internal drive over this weekend and I am happy to say that everything is back to norm now. Thank you bfdtv and all other contributing members of the AVS community.

Here are somethings I have encountered during this replacement process that I like to share.

1. The drive I purchased was WD EVDS. I was lucky that the drive received was manufactured on Oct 9, 2009 (I was ready to go the extra mile to deal with the soft boot issue but I did not need to).

2. While runnig WinMFS, I did not see the drive listed in the WinMFS form. I was using a direct sata line to the free slots on my Dell XPS' motherboard. I tried all four of the free slots and none of them worked. I ended up using the sata connection for the DVD drive (going off road from the instructions) and with that connection I was able to see the new drive in WinMFS.

3. While booting up with this connection, the OS (Window Vista) reported it has successfully installed the device driver for the origial TiVo drive. This message did not seem to affect the overall backup and restore process.

4. While doing the backup (got the same installing the device driver message for the new drive), I got a warning dialog saying that I am about to write over my OS or Boot disk and do you want to continue. This maybe because I am using the original DVD connection which can be a boot drive (I did not change any of the BIOS configuration for drives) and I replied OK.

5. The TiVo boot up without any problem with the new drive and I can tell it is close to being silent (from about 18' away) while I can easily hear the old drive from the same location.

6. The TiVo desktop (latest version) on my PC refused to come up after all these. Not sure why but a "repair" from the program control fixed that.

Congrats. I remember when I upgraded my hard drive to a Samsung 1TB drive about a year ago. Went pretty well, but I too recall encountering some moderately weird developments throughout the process. At least, things that weren't described as being part of the process in either of the upgrade guides I used as reference throughout the upgrade. Ultimately, it just worked, despite not everything going according to plan.

Incidentally, from the outset, my Samsung drive has been running fairly loud on a consistent basis, like it's constantly laboring and lurching. Certainly louder than the original drive. I assume this noise is the result of the constant writing to the dual 30 minute buffers. I thought for sure it was a defect that would wreak havoc on the longevity of the drive and the performance of the Tivo, but it's still chugging along a year later without fail, albeit, not any quieter.

I was looking at this adapter, a USB 2.0 to Ethernet Converter, wondering if this might work as an additional ethernet port for the Tivo.

The existing ethernet port on my Tivo is occupied by a cable that connects to a nearby wireless bridge device. This is how I receive my automatic daily programming updates. The reason I would like to create a second ethernet port is so that I may be able to do occasional speedy wired transfers of video to/from my desktop computer.

Since it's cumbersome to reach behind my a/v cabinet in order to switch cables back 'n forth to the existing single port, I was going to try and use this adapter so that I may simply leave the second ethernet cable plugged in all the time by virtue of this adapter.

Any idea if this adapter might work for just such a purpose?

I'm fairly certain that TiVo can't communicate with two different network devices plugged in at the same time. To work at all, your USB-to-Ethernet converter would have to ape TiVo's wireless networking dongle, precisely. The device implements a network stack internally, which does a lot of the work of receiving and sending messages through the network. If the converter doesn't communicate with TiVo exactly the way that it expects (which is probably some proprietary protocol), it won't work at all, much less as a second network connection.

What's wrong with using the wire that you have connected to transfer video to and from your PC? It's not at all restricted to downloading daily updates; it could do that simultaneously with other network tasks.

All USB adapters require drivers to make them work. The TiVo does not have built-in Linux drivers for any USB devices, aside from the TiVo wireless adapter and SDV adapters.

Am I missing a crucial bit of info...? If you can eliminate your wireless bridge and hard wire your TiVo to an Ethernet switch connected to your network, one connection is all you need to achieve your desired results.

It's even more direct than that, to my thinking. The wireless bridge is already connecting the TiVo to his home network, which presumably includes his computer as well. He can do his transfers exactly as it's already hooked up....everything's already set. (This is the way one of mine is set up...works great.)

schwaggy, the bit I didn't provide is the fact that my main desktop editing computer is across the room from the Tivo. I've got my router wired to this desktop computer, which then wirelessly networks/communicates with my Squeezebox audio player from across the room, which is set up on my a/v cabinet, along with my Tivo.

One of the side features of the Squeezebox is that it can act as a wireless bridge. This negates any need to utilize a Tivo (or other brand) wireless adapter for my S3. I simply run a cable from the Squeezebox over to the Tivo so that both can be concurrently connected to the network. So this is the cable that is currently occupying my Tivo ethernet port.


This is also the pt. of progprog in the post immediately above. And I understand all this, but I'm assuming that any video transfers done wirelessly will be significantly slower than a direct cable connection. While I'm sure that will be fine some of the time, I know there will be those occasions when I won't want to wait any longer than absolutely necessary for a transfer to be completed.

And being that the devices are across the room from one another, neither can I simply leave a cable laying around on the carpet across the middle of the room all of the time. For short term connections when I need a speedier transfer, fine. But once completed, then the cable can be wound up and hidden behind the A/V cabinet, waiting for the next time-critical transfer task.

I can still do that, but my hope was this usb/ethernet adapter would allow be to keep the one end of this second ethernet cable always connected to the back of the Tivo. This would have prevented the groans, sweat and swearing as I struggle to reach behind the a/v equpment cabinet to feel around, find and then switch-out the Squeezebox crossover (or patch?) cable for the second, dedicated video ethernet cable.

+1

I'm pretty sure the TiVo won't be able to utilize both networks simultaneously.

If you're that worried about performance, I'd worry about trying to increase that single link's throughput. That'd be your best bet.

The TiVo's network throughput is CPU limited to around 13-15Mbps anyways, and there's nothing you can do to increase that value. It's a hard limit.