De-TiVoing myself

Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 03 Jan 2005 17:42:10 GMT

After all of the effort that I’ve went through over the years to try to sell the things to friends and family, it feels odd to be unplugging my TiVo. Now that we’ve turned off our satellite TV service, though, there’s no new content flowing onto the TiVo, which makes it a lot less interesting. All we’re left with is 75 GB of old stuff that we’d like to get around to watching sooner or later.

Fortunately, TiVo hacking has continued to move on since I first added a bigger hard drive to my first TiVo over 4 years ago. Using the tools discussed on the dealdatabase.com TiVo hacking forums, I’m currently extracting all 75 GB worth of programming from an old TiVo and putting it onto a 120 GB drive that I had sitting around. Then, once that’s done, I’ll use mencoder to re-encode them into something a bit more modern then MPEG-2, probably XviD. This will make it trivial to play things back using MythTV, which is really the point of the whole exercise. While MythTV has its problems, it’s pretty good at playing back pre-encoded video, so I won’t miss that aspect of the TiVo experience.

Once that’s done, I’ll probably put the old TiVo up on ebay. I’ll be sad to see it go, but time and technology move on.

I guess I find it kind of ironic that I’m doing this on the same day that TiVo finally officially announces their TiVoToGo service. So, if my Series 2 TiVo was still working, then I could use it to stream DRM-ified video to a small number of Windows systems. If I had any Windows systems. So, instead of doing it to official way, I guess I’m just cutting out the middleman and doing it myself. As usual.

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Another TiVo Repair

Posted by Scott Laird Sat, 28 Aug 2004 00:15:31 GMT

As mentioned before, I have two TiVos at home, a Series 1 upstairs and a Series 2 downstairs. I love the things. At this point, I refuse to watch TV without them. They’re genuinely changed the way I interact with my TV, and that’s mostly a good thing.

I just wish they’d stop dying on me.

It started a few months ago, when the Series 2 TiVo started locking up once or twice per day. I ended up replacing the hard drive in it, and as part of the upgrade process, I discovered that the old drive had a number of bad sectors right in the middle of the swap partition. It worked perfectly after the drive swap was complete, so I assumed that the worst was over and I was in for another year or two of trouble-free TiVo use.

Unfortunately, in early July it started crashing again, and by the end of the month, it wouldn’t stay up for more then an hour without freezing. We ended up unplugging it entirely and leaving the TV off for the first half of August. Eventually, though, the lack of TV got to us, and I ordered a new drive from newegg to replace the 120 GB drive in the TiVo, assuming that the drive had failed again.

Unfortunately, swapping drives didn’t help this time. I didn’t see any media errors while copying data, and the TiVo is still locking up at least once per day. At this point, I’m getting fed up with the whole thing. At some point this weekend I’m going to rip the box back open and make sure that the IDE cable isn’t broken, but after that I’m out of things to try. I’m going to have to call TiVo and see if there’s anything that they can do for me.

Since new TiVos are selling for as little as $100 this week, and this one is almost two years old, I wouldn’t normally be that irritated. Unfortunately, we paid for lifetime service on the dying box, and that’s currently going for $300. So, the dying TiVo would cost $400 to replace, not just $100. And that’s more then enough money to get me to spend an hour or two sitting on hold, waiting to yell at their support people. That’s because the “lifetime service” is good for the lifetime of the box, not the life of the owner. When the box dies, your $300 evaporates.

I tried calling TiVo’s support line. They try really hard to shunt you off to their web site, or into their automated support recordings. Of course none of the options provided have anything at all do with “my TiVo crashes several times every day.” By playing the “other” “other” “other” game, I eventually got through to a real person, but all he could do was give me a case number and punt me into the 35+ minute tech support queue. And I don’t have time for that now.

I swear, I’m inches from selling both TiVos and building myself a bunch of cheap MythTV boxes.

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A solution for the TiVo-without-a-phoneline problem?

Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 26 Aug 2004 01:18:14 GMT

One of the more frequent complaints that I’ve heard from people dropping their POTS line and moving to pure VoIP is that their TiVo stops working. TiVos have a modem in them. They need to download program guide information at least once every two weeks, and modems don’t work well over VoIP. There are ways around this–newer “Series 2” models have a USB port and support wired and wireless Ethernet adapters, and older models can be hacked with ”TiVoNET” cards that provide an internal Ethernet port. The problem is that TiVoNET cards are expensive and require opening your TiVo and voiding its warranty.

I think I have a unique way around this. It requires a local Asterisk server, a spare FXS port, and a modem, but I don’t see any obvious reason why it wouldn’t work. Since I have a series 1 TiVo and I’d like to drop my home phone line, I’ll probably check this out soon.

Here’s what needs to happen:

  1. Connect the modem to your Asterisk box’s serial port. Install a getty that understands PPP (I’ve used mgetty in the past), and configure PPP to allow users to connect without a password. Turn logging up as high as possible.
  2. Connect the modem to a dedicated FXS port on the Asterisk server.
  3. Plug your TiVo’s modem into a different FXS port on the Asterisk server.
  4. Force a connection attempt on the TiVo. Watch Asterisk’s logs to see what number it’s dialing.
  5. Set up your dial plan in extensions.conf to map TiVo’s phone number onto the modem’s FXS port.
  6. Have the TiVo dial again. It should connect to your modem instead of TiVo’s servers.
  7. Using the PPP logs, fix things so that it actually logs in correctly.
  8. Force another connection. At this point, it should log in and start exchanging IP packets with TiVo’s servers. Verify that it’s able to complete a full download.
  9. Turn down logging on pppd.

It’s not particularly simple, but it should work, and you can do it without adding hardware to your TiVo. You’ll have to purchase at least one extra FXS port, possibly two, and they start at $50 for two and go up from there. Since TiVoNET cards start at $70 or so, this may not be a great deal, but it’s definitely good for hack value.

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TiVo repair

Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 19 Apr 2004 02:43:01 GMT

I’ve finally had it with my downstairs TiVo. As I mentioned before, it’s been crashing with increasing regularity. I’ve been avoiding dealing with it for a few reasons; mostly, I’ve been too busy with other things, but I also hate debugging problems with black boxes, and my TiVo is definitely a black box, even if it does run Linux.

Unfortunately, my inaction hasn’t made the problem go away. If anything, it’s happening even more often now then it was a month or two ago. But, in the meantime, I’ve been able to watch a couple crashes and gleaned a bit of information:

  1. It doesn’t just stop–when playing back recordings, it skips a couple times first, with long pauses, then a few frames, then another long pause. This repeats for a couple cycles, and then it finally crashes.
  2. When it’s working right, the TiVo’s front-panel LEDs blink brightly when I press buttons on the remote. When it’s dead, the front panel LEDS still blink, but only slightly. It looks like there are two LEDs that blink, one driven by hardware and the other by software. When it’s dead, the software one doesn’t respond. But, when the box has just crashed, the software LED still works. It takes a while for it to die.

If I saw the same symptoms on a server, I’d be thinking “bad hard drive”–we’re seeing processes lock up in the ‘D’ state here, followed by a congestive collapse of the whole system, as every system process that touches the disk (or talks to a process that talks to the disk, like syslog) slowly crawls to a halt. Bad motherboards or power supplies don’t usually leave parts of the OS working right for a few minutes.

So, I pulled the drive out of the box and I’m currently cloning it onto a new, larger drive. There are decent tools and directions online for this, so it’s not a big pain rounding up all of the pieces. Plus, when it’s done, I should have twice as much disk space.

As a plus, the original drive started spitting out unrecoverable drive errors around 2% of the way into the copy. Hopefully that was in the data area of the drive, not in the middle of important program code. Hmm–I wonder if it’s in the swap area? That’d really kill the box, but it’d leave it working fine after a reboot, until it got busy enough to swap. Yeah, that’s probably what happened.

Update (Apr 20, 2004): It seems to have worked. The TiVo has made it two days without crashing; that hasn’t happened in weeks. It seems slightly faster, and it now holds 146 hours, up from 60 hours.

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The joys of exploding TiVos

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 09 Mar 2004 23:18:43 GMT

I love my TiVos. I have two, one for each TV. I can’t cope with TV without them anymore. I suppose I’m a TiVoaddict.

With the addiction comes a fear, though–what happens when they die? How do I cope? Even if they replace it, I still lose all of the shows that I’ve saved and never quite got arond to watching. Worse, the replacement won’t know me the way that the old one does. I’ll have to re-train it, adding all of the season passes for all of my favorite shows. I’ll have to tell it that I love “Mythbusters” and hate Pokemon. I’ll have to convince it that I’m not gay.

Unfortunately, the day that I’ve been fearing for over three years has arrived. I always assumed that the upstairs TiVo would go first. It’s an old 14-hour Series 1 TiVo, as old as they get. I added an extra hard drive as soon as I got it, so it’s been spinning away for over 3 years, completely out of warranty. But no, it was the other one that died. The pristine 60-hour Series 2, just over a year old, that started locking up. Sometimes it’ll make it a day or two, and sometimes it’ll lock up again before it finishes rebooting. It’s frustrating, and it’s getting increasingly useless for watching TV.

I’ll call their tech support people when I get a chance. It took most of an hour on hold last time, and I don’t have time for that right now. I’m currently casting a lustful eye over the MythTV boxes that a couple friends have built. They aren’t as well-designed as TiVo, but since it’s free software running on Linux running on a normal PC, they’re easy to expand, they network well, and I can fix them myself when they break.

I just don’t know if I have the heart to abandon my TiVos, though.

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