Tivo
These are notes, mostly to myself, about the Tivo I got on August 21, 2001.
- Model HDR31204 (standalone, Phillips, single-drive, 30 gigabytes, Quantum LCT20, version 1.3).
- Quantum drive is really, really quiet.
- Downloaded MFSTools and backed up.
- Backup was going to be 6 gigs but it failed (couldn’t write more than 2 gigs to a file on Windows FAT32 partition).
- Tried again with -Tl32 option and the backup was 1.1 gigs, compressed (gzip -9) 383 megabytes.
- The CR2032 backup battery was never installed in my Tivo. They just plain forgot to do it! I had to go to Target and buy one.
- The setup screens are very slick.
- I have a AT&T Digital Cable General Instruments cable box. This product/service already sucked ass, but it’s so much worse with a Tivo:
- Can’t change channels above 99
- Channel changing is slow
- Already-annoying banner following every successful channel change is even more annoying)
- The program-grabbing stage takes a very long time (about 4 hours for me). It ends up being an almost out-of-body experience. The estimated time never seems to admit that it’s going to take longer than it originally thought. Rather than using actual elapsed time as a basis for estimating remaining time, it seems to use original estimate multiplied by percentage remaining, so you get subjective minutes that objectively last 2-3 minutes, kind of like the clock in my grade school.
- The next scheduled update call was June 15. I assume that means that if I hadn’t manually started an update, it wouldn’t have updated for 10 months.
- There was a bunch of demo videos on the machine. The content wasn’t very interesting but it was really nice to see how high-quality the video was. It looked much, much better than my cable, which I may have mentioned sucks ass.