Joe Smith: I love my TiVo
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TiVo
Current setup
| Who | When | Model | Hours (Best) |
Version | Location | Inputs | Satellite Encoding |
| both | 2007/11 | DirecTV HR21 | 200 SD, 50 HD |
0x40d (not TiVo) | Home Theatre | 2 | MPEG2 and MPEG4 |
| Joe | 2007/11 | DirecTV R15 | 100 SD |
0x1236 (not TiVo) | Play Room | 2 | MPEG2 |
| Sally | 2007/07 | TiVo S2 Dual-Tuner | 80 (27) |
9.3-01-2-649 | Living Room | 1.5 | sat D10 and basic cable |
| both | 2004/08 | Hughes HR10-250 | 237 SD, 36 HD |
6.3f-01-2-357 | Living Room | 2 | MPEG2 and OTA |
| Joe | 2001/08 | Philips HDR112 | 118 (32) |
3.0-01-1-000 | Family Room | 1 | sat D10 or basic cable |
| Sally | 2001/03 | Sony SVR-2000 | 32 (9) |
3.0-01-1-010 | Bedroom | 0 | manual A/V |
| Wide dish receives five satellites, has 8x multiswitch. Total possible simultaneous recordings: 8.5 | (0.5 = basic cable on S2DT) |
Marital bliss is His & Hers TiVo units. It's the only realistic way to
keep Wishlists and Thumbs-Up data separate.
Previous setup diagrams: 2001 2003
2004 2006
2007
Disk sizes
Discussion on Disk Sizes; an 80 billion
byte disk holds 74.5 gigabytes.
Copy tystream to RAID on Linux
To guard against the case where my TiVo's hard disk goes out again, I copy some
of the recordings to another Linux box that has 250 GB of disks in RAID-1.
cd ~/joe-tivo; perl ~/bin/from-tivo joe-tivo:3105 'TOON|G4TTV'
TiVo headquarters in Alviso (north San Jose, California).
The first two pictures are from when when TiVo hits 1 million subscribers
(December 2003), the next two from from November 2005.
Request for enhancements
Software additions I would like to see added:
- Ability to store Preferences/Wishlists/SeasonPasses off-site for safekeeping.
- Multiple bookmarks per show, for multiple viewers in household.
- User-defined flags in Now Playing (indicating "I've finished watching
this show; you can delete it now" and "here's something interesting
for you to see").
- Add a subtle mark in Now Playing to indicate which shows have bookmarks.
- Ability to record contents of buffer at all times, including when
a new show has already started. (When viewing buffer 30 minutes
delayed at 10:15, I want to record the 9:45 to 10:00 portion of
show in buffer even though a new show started at 10:00. In this
case, Record Buffer would create two enties in Now Showing.)
- Upcoming Episodes screen should automatically detect and display conflicts.
- A way to tell TiVo that a given recording is defective (or was
pre-empted) and therefore needs to be purged from the 28-day list,
and rerecorded ASAP.
- "The Daily Show" - record one episode per day regardless of the lack
of guide data. Could be done by TiVo headquarters by postprocessing
known-to-be-bad data from TMS.
- Auto-pad recordings when no conflicts. Minutes, or 30 or 90 seconds.
- Ability to jump to show by name in Season Pass Manager.
- Redundancy built-in for two-disk units. (I've had two IDE disks go out on me already).
- Periodic backup: Once a day the non-MFS partitions on the A drive
get copied over to the B drive. Boot PROMS modified to boot off of the
B drive if the A drive is unreadable. (Unwatched shows on the A
drive would be irretrievable in this case, but the To Do List would
still be functional.)
- RAID-1: Both MFS and non-MFS partitions are mirrored. Full protection
against disk failure, at the expense of having only half the capacity.
- Ability to switch from Mirrored to Backed-Up at any time.
Ability to switch from Backed-Up to Mirrored when space available.
More suggestions: Megazone's
Request For Enhancements.
Back to the Joe's page.
Maintained by joe@inwap.com
Marital bliss is His & Hers TiVo units. It's the only realistic way to
keep Wishlists and Thumbs-Up data separate.
To guard against the case where my TiVo's hard disk goes out again, I copy some
of the recordings to another Linux box that has 250 GB of disks in RAID-1.
