TiVo Series 3 - "Official" Thread - Page 207

I have owned a Sony DHG HDD500 for the past 4 years. Recently, I ordered analog only cable (limited cable) and discovered that my unit was not able to tune the channels. I am now running the cable directly into a Sony KV 30HS420 (pre-digital) TV.

I returned the Sony DVR for repair under extended service plan and they said that they can no longer get the parts to repair it. I also own a Dish PAL DVR and that pulls in the OTA signal better than the Sony.

My question is should I replace the Sony with a TIVO Series 3 w/ Lifetime service. I was wondering how the OTA tuner compares to the Sony. I'm getting pretty tired of the TVGOS thing and would really like to have a better tuner. Is the OTA tuner in the Premiers better that the Series 3?

I probably won't go digital cable anytime soon. Any advice is welcome.

Thanks.

The TiVo HD's ATSC tuner is unequivocably better than the S3's (and also a bit better than the Premiere's, for that matter).

The S3's might be a little better than the Sony's, but I wouldn't expect it to be by that much if it is. In fact, the S3's tuner is pretty old, and may actually only be 4th generation like the Sony's. It *might* be 5th, but I still wouldn't expect as much of a difference between the two as the 4th to 6th, like the Premiere has. The 6th generation is also better with multipath than the 4th or 5th.

If you can't find an HD cheap (and last time I looked, it wasn't easy, for good reason), I'd just go with a brand new Premiere (somebody just said somewhere else here that they ordered one from Wolf Camera for only $65). You'll get the newest version of the unit (I don't think the S3 has all the potential streaming abilities of the HD and Premiere, either - and some of that is free).

If you can find the S3 with lifetime dirt cheap, it's up to you, but don't be disappointed if the tuner doesn't turn out to be any better, going by what I remember when it was out (I also have a Sony, and I was paying attention to that somewhat at the time, even though I wasn't especially looking for a replacement right then. I was fortunate enough to come across a TiVo HD later at a pretty good, closeout price).

Many of the posts say the S3 is more robust. I like the looks of the S3 better.. maybe because it looks more like the Sony. I don't want to get tied to old technology like the Sony's OTA TVGOS. Its just a matter of time before the broadcasters will stop inserting that signal.

It has served me well these 4 plus years. Unfortunately, Sony chose to go another direction. They did come through with a software update to allow the guide signal to be received after the digital transition. Many dvr's, LG LST-3410 comes to mind, were left out in the cold with no way to download a guide.

Thanks for your input.

Rob

Yes - the build quality is definitely better than the Premiere's, and also somewhat better than the HD's, too.

I doubt if the S3's tuner is any less sensitive than the Sony's. I just thought from the way it sounded that it was more of a priority to upgrade the ATSC tuner performance, too.

Then go for the S3, if it has everything else you'd be satisied with.

I have had an S3 for four and a half years and have enough confidence in its continued viability to have recently added a 1TB eSATA drive. I don't know whether the build quality of the Premiere TiVos differs markedly from the S3's but the S3 does provide more useful information on the front panel than the Premiere line does. The new software enables A B and C buttons on the Premiere remote to perform useful operations. Those buttons are not available on the S3 remote.

The Premiere's big advantage, to me at least, is its HD graphical user interface. I have found navigation to be easier and more intuitive on the Premiere than it is on the S3. This is a controversial issue, though. Many Premiere users opt for the traditional SD GUI, which makes it just like the S3, including making the A B and C buttons on the Premiere remote useless.

I honestly don't think I can recommend any TiVo any longer. Now I haven't had any experience with the Premier so I can't speak about that one, but ever since the introduction of the tuner adapter, it has made watching/recording my TiVo's a real pain in the butt.

During the first year with it my TA's would constantly go into "brick mode." That's a flashing green light that blinks 8 times on and off with a pause at the end of the 8th blink. The only way to have that fixed was to get very lucky with someone at customer service, have an inside contact to directly fix it, or to call cable card support.

They did put a fix on that, now it goes out about once every 4 or 5 months and usually I usually call cable card support to get it fixed. Both of my TA's will go out when this happens.

There is a lag time when connecting with certain sdv channels. I have a real issue with this and Spike. It's a 50/50 chance if that channel gets recorded at all.

It seems like I lose my cable card connection from time to time. I get grey screens on both tuners. A reboot will fix this, but when I reboot the tuner adapter is suppose to go to a 6 blink and hold mode when this is going on. If it doesn't, and that's the majority of times then I have to get the TiVo to recognize the tuner adapter. Sometimes all I have to do is simply unplug the USB on the back of the TA and plug it back in. But other times I have to power the TA down, power it up, unplug the USB. Sometimes it matters if I unplug from just the USB on the back of the TA or if I use the one on the back of the TiVo.

I say I have a hassle at least every two weeks.

Now I will say that I think that my problem is probably more restricted to the area in which I live in, which is a combination of ex Adelphia and ex Comcast plus Time Warner Cable. The point is that the damn system is just not reliable, at least not for me.

I singed up for MLB Extra Innings, something I have done for the past 3 years with no issues. This year for some reason they changed a code in it so that TA's could not recognize the signal. They had to bypass the system to get it to work for me. 3 days downtime.

I'd go to satellite in a heartbeat if I had a clear line of sight. Cable card technology is just not a dependable working solution in my area.

For all of you who have not had these issues with a tuner adapter, be grateful. For those of you who never have had to deal with SDV, also consider yourself lucky.

hook -- By the grace of God, Cox OKC has not gone to any SDV channels, or at least none that I use. Consequently, I have not had to mess with tuning adapters, which reports have lead me to believe are buggy and unstable. In stark contrast, my CableCARDs have been solid for some time.

SDV really is a PIA.

When I fast forward on those channels, they all go to black,
which essentially makes FF useless.

FCD

The OP only wants it for OTA, remember.

Well, I was just ranting. I wasn't really referring .to his question.

I'm a transposed Dodger fan, win or lose I watch their games. I purchase MLB Extra Innings.

Prior to SDV I never had an interruption in service. I pay $179.00 a year with the early bird special. Regular prices is $199.00.

Last year when SDV first appeared in our area I got locked out of about 4 games due to a problem at the headend. I don't remember the details but it SDV was part of the issue. I received a $20.00 compensation.

This year right after the first 10 days of free preview my channels dropped. Now I always double check my order and I was assured that the order was in place and service would be fine after the 10 days. But for some reason they put a change in the code in the signal and I missed 3 days of service. They did a manual override and service was started. I was told I would receive a credit for the time I didn't get service, but after it was fixed and I asked the person who mentioned the credit about how much I could expect on the next bill (by email) I did not get a response. I let it go because they did work hard to resolve my issue.

On Wednesday night I retired to the upstairs bedroom, grabbed my remote and I had a gray screen. Well, probably kicked by SDV I thought, so I switched channels and went back to the channel I wanted. Message said "channel not available." I knew right then that my tuner adapter was in brick mode (8 blinks and a pause).

I called cable card support, got through within 5 minutes and advised the rep that only one of my tuner adapters was having this issue and gave him the serial number. 5 minutes later I had a solid green light. SDV was working. But not MLB Extra Innings.

So despite the fact that I had killed the lights and my 7 birds were sleeping I went downstairs and turned on my big set. MLB was working there. Weird! I sent an email out to my contact at TW, who at 10:30 pm responded and said she would look at it in the morning.

Next morning I got up and found MLB was gone from my downstairs tuner adapter as well. I was told that they believed it was a problem with the billing system and the addressable system communicating with each other. They may have to reset my cable cards to fix that.

So at 9:00 pm when it wasn't fixed I sent another email requesting compensation now as I've lost 5 days service. I did not get a response on that as of yet.

See this is my whole issue with TiVo. It goes to the cable card concept way back to when the HD boxes were first introduced. I believe they knew SDV was going to come and I think they said "We will cross that bridge when we get to it." And you know for many of you I know it works, and works well. But for me it's a constant battle. I have shows that are partially recorded. I have shows that are totally missed (only on Spike). Basically the main reason I dumped the SA 8300 and shelled out a $1000.00 on the S3 when it came out was I wanted a reliable DVR.

Now I find in reflection that I'm right back where I was when I had the SA 8300. Yes, it's more reliable but I have to reboot it seems at least once a month or more on each machine. The missed recordings and partial recordings are a mystery. And there is nothing I can do about it. If I had a regular digital box I could watch On Demand HBO or Showtime and wouldn't need a DVR. They also have that Look Back and Start Over features.

If I didn't have 163 shows recorded on the two TiVo's, I'd go to TW and hand them my cable cards and just get a digital tuner. This is ridiculous.

So today I'll wait. I'll check to see if MLB Extra Innings shows up. I'll send emails and see if there are any updates. But this IMHO really goes back to TiVo missing the boat when it came to SDV. For all of you out there with TA's that work great, man, I wish I was one of you.

To be continued.rant over for now.

Hey group. Are we ever going to get guide program info for the new HD channels we got a while back? ( HUB 1111, OPERA NET 1152,
Lifetime HD 1211, Oxygen 1215, Tru TV 1220, Game Show Net 1281,
Yes HD 1341) It seems like its been over a month or more and nothing has shown up. Usually takes only a few weeks.

Ben Music (tivo S3)

I have received several guide updates over the past couple of weeks. I have every channel except 1211. That is not showing anything and not provided by the tuner adapter. That makes me think that it simply is not available yet.

Hi Hook,
I agree that 1211 is not available yet, but are you saying that your S3 tivo has program information for all the rest
of those new HD channels?

Thanks,
Ben Music

I don't have an S3 active anymore, but that wouldn't matter. My TiVo HD's have it and if they have it the S3 would too. You are probably on a different hook up with me. I'm in Time Warner, City of Cleveland. You may have to report those changes to TiVo to get them in your area. Here you go:

http://www.tivo.com/setupandsupport/...neup_tool.html

You are right. The Guide information is identical on the S3 and Premiere boxes. Both versions of the TiVo software use the Tribune Media Services Guide information.

Heck of a lot safer to stay home and watch, anyway, rather than go to their park in person.

Oh puhleeezze. The guy was a Giant Fan. They have got to be the most obnoxious fans in the world.

Just kidding, I wouldn't want to see anybody hurt like that. Once I went to see the Red Sox play against the Yankees at Yankee stadium. I was a Red Sox fan back then (still am I guess). I wore a Sox cap to the stadium.

Fortunately the Yankees kicked their butts that day. I could hear people standing around me waiting for the subway talking about throwing me on the third rail.

To continue on with my MLB Extra Innings nightmare, I advised my contact in TW that while missing out last night was not a big deal since they didn't play, tonight they were playing the Reds at Cincinnati. Which is a rare prime time game for me.

She responded that she had escalated the issue to Corporate Billing. That didn't make me feel better. Then she said, if they don't fix it she will push the manual override switch again.

That's how they solved it the last time. So they cut me out two days service on something I paid $179.00 for and it could have been fixed two days ago?

Where is the beating my head against the wall icon?

I suppose she was trying to get it fixed correctly, because apparently this manual override thing is not a permanent fix. But that's not my problem, that's their problem.

Do cable companies charge extra for the tuning adapters? Was looking into getting TIVOs for me (Charter), my mom (Cox) and my brother (Comcast).

Tuner adapters are free. Cable cards, and TiVo Service you have to pay for.

Well I purchased an S3 and an HD XL. The tuners seem to be about equal. Both are better had handling multi-path than the Sony box. I have a very directional antenna with a rotator and have found that I only need to change the direction of the antenna for the one station, which is about 130 degrees off from the next closest station. I'm getting fewer drop-outs. Now I have to decide (justify) how to keep both. I've disconnected my PAL dvr and am getting ready to box up my Sony HDD500.
I'll miss the Sony's menus and playback features. Time to move on. I really enjoy the tivo's network capabilities. Now if I could just get the TIVO Desktop to work with my heavily firewalled router.

I don't understand. Why wouldn't the the TiVo Desktop software work with your router? I have a secure router too and I don't have any issues with it.

Well, let me back up a bit. I don't use a windows computer, I have a Mac and I do have the TiVo Desktop software installed, but I use PyTivo to do my transfers from machine to machine, along with toast titanium. lol, it's been so long since I've done anything with it I'm not sure why the TiVo desktop is even installed. I don't use it to play music with, I use Airport Express. The mp3 in the TiVo HD is a piece of garbage and crashed frequently on me.

And you don't need TiVo Desktop for your router connections. So maybe just Google PyTivo and take a look at that, maybe that will work better for you. It's actually easier to use with a PC then a Mac.

Our Series3 HD TiVo recently stopped working. The initial symptom was that the video gradually deteriorated as faint wavy lines appeared and moved up and down and back and forth across the screen. This lasted for a couple of months and I just didn't take the time to try to diagnose what was causing it. The effect was similar to what you would see if there was electrical interference affecting the coaxial cable but without static, only an ever-changing pattern of wavy lines that shifted their dance across the screen and disappeared and then reappeared.

But a couple of weeks ago the unit suddenly stopped displaying programming and started rebooting. It would display the Welcome screen for a few minutes, then the screen would go black for some seconds and then go back to the Welcome screen and this would continue until I pulled the power cord.

Thinking the problem was caused by corrupted data on the aging hard drive, I purchased a Western Digital WD10EVDS and copied the old hard drive using WinMFS and installed the new drive in the unit. When I started it up, it still would not progress past the Welcome screen and after some minutes would reboot. So, thinking perhaps the original hard drive had passed along corrupted settings to the new WD hard drive, I used the hard drive from a second, working TiVo S3 HD to try to initialize the new hard drive but it still would only boot to the Welcome screen and then loop back to the Welcome screen again and again. During this process, I tried a full copy of the original, failing hard drive. Then I tried a truncated copy of the original hard drive. Then I tried a truncated copy of the hard drive from a different TiVo S3 HD. In each case, the unit would start to boot to the Welcome screen and then restart.
At this point I tried WinMFS's bootpage fix with option 1. This didn't yield any better results. I then tried bootpage fix option 2 with similar results.
Then I read online that some of the WD green hard drives were being distributed with the intellipark feature so I created a boot CD with wdidle3.exe on it and ran wdidle3 /D to change the park setting to 62 minutes. This still didn't stop the endless reboot loop.
I then pulled both of the multi-stream cable cards and powered up. This time the unit progressed through the entire boot process until it got to the point where it realized there were no cable cards installed. It notified me that it was expecting two cards and instructed me to install the cards.
I followed the instructions on the screen which said to install the cable cards with the bottom card to be inserted first, but as soon as I installed the first cable card, the unit rebooted and entered the familiar boot sequence loop.

I tried booting the unit with only one cable card installed in the first position and that resulted in the endless reboot loop. I tried booting with only the second cable card installed and it entered the endless reboot loop. I tried swapping the cards and it entered the endless reboot loop. In short, I tried several different variations involving the cable cards and the only persistent observation was that the unit would not progress past the Welcome screen with the cards installed and, if I booted without the cards installed, it would immediately reboot as soon as either of the cable cards was installed.

With the combination of the faint wavy lines that dance across the screen and the reboot loop that only occurs when the cable cards are installed in the unit, I concluded that the power supply may be failing and has become too weak to provide adequate, stable voltage to the unit while the cable cards are installed.

I have ordered a new power supply to see if that will fix the problem.
Does anyone have any additional thoughts about this? Any other trouble shooting suggestions? At this point I am just trying to apply logical tests to see if I can get the unit to work but I do not have any formal education in electronics and I do not have specialized testing equipment to tell me if any of the motherboard components might be causing the problem. The power supply replacement seems like an easy and prudent measure to take based on the symptoms I'm experiencing but I wonder if someone with more experience sees something that would be worth investigating that I haven't tried yet.

Any suggestions are welcome. Thank you.

Yep, swap power supply is the only thing left to try, beyond that it's likely a motherboard or tuner fault which you can't fix. Another thing to try to rule out HDMI is to use component video output, but given the reboots that's likely not going to help.

Here is my sob story on a 2007 Tivo HD with 500GB expander, was watching a recorded program when the box just rebooted.
The first welcome screen with just the orange sun thing came up and stayed. Did not pass this point and only the power light on.
Of course I pulled the plug, waited and then pluged it back in.
The front panel lights flashed and nothing...

Did all the recomened stuff, unpluged everthing and did power only, tried a new outlet directly to the box with eveything unpluged. Even used a Series 3 plug from new outlet to the box. Nothing but a brief flash of all the front lights. Even the fan did not spin up.

Called Tivo and they seem to agree it is the power supply. Find it strange as nothing else plugged into the surge protector even hiccuped.

So do you think that is the problem?

If so what should I do, Tivo $150 plus tax for a refurbished unit or do I layout $100 (or so) for a power supply and replace on my own and if it is a mo-bo problem I'm out the power supply money... plus furhter replacement costs?

TIA

What service do you have? Lifetime or month by month.
If lifetime I'd have Tivo swap it out for a replacement and then after a few weeks to verify everything is OK I'd upsize the internal HDD to a 1Tb and get rid of your expander. I'd guess your expander caused your problems but other than plugging it back in your replacement(and possibly having it blow out the replacements power supply) you have no way to know for sure.

my s3 Box suddenly shut down and re-started itself twice last night,
in the span of about 2 hours.

It was fine after each re-start, but very annoying and completely unexplained.

Has this happened to anyone else?

thanks,

FCD

Probably the start of the hard drive going out. Unless you've already replaced it. They don't last forever.

Good (and bad) to know.

I also have an external drive attached.

Are there directions on -line on how to replace one or both?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

FCD