A while back I posted a tearful tribute, in song, to my dear departed TiVo. I still don’t know what happened to it, but it was an old Series 2 with the “40 Hour” capacity. She served her owners proud for almost four years, and I decided it would be cheaper and certainly faster to replace it with a new box rather than try to fix old blue. The “80 hour” Series 2 TiVos are now yesterday’s news, and apparently there was a big promotion through TiVo’s website recently so there was a glut of those babies available on eBay. After losing several auctions by a buck, I finally scored one for eighty bucks and the seller was nice enough to ship it to me via FedEx.

The fun stopped there.

Actually, it wasn’t so bad, but I was forced to read a lot of idiotic posts in various TiVo user forums trying to get to the bottom of my concerns about doing a fresh setup on my new TiVo, and thought I’d throw this up here for anyone in the same boat; hopefully I’ll save someone a few hours.

Here’s the deal: most of the older TiVos (certainly all the Series 1s and many of the early Series 2s) required you to do the initial setup of a new TiVo over a landline telephone. This was not a problem four years ago for me, but I have since dumped my copper landline because among other things Quest is a horrible company run by crooks. Anyway, suffice to say I had no landline in the house. My old TiVo had since been upgraded to connect to the TiVo service over my wireless internet connection, but as I mentioned the initial setup is supposed to be done with a landline.

So I started surfing around, found quite a number of posts claiming that you can do this, and the posts were for the most part incoherent and loaded with all kinds of special dialing prefix codes you were supposed to enter, etc. Every post seemed to say something different. Frustrated but hopeful, I saved a few of the tips and hooked up the new box. And the cursing began.

At first, I thought it would be easy, as I had a menu option to use the internet to connect, but every time I tried logging in to my router I was denied access. I eventually turned off all encryption and broadcast the SSID again, to make it as open as I could. My router would show up, I could feed it a password, but then it would say it couldn’t find the DNS server. This same router is providing IP addresses to my laptop and Brenda’s laptop, so this struck me as odd. Some more cursing ensued.

Out of desperation, I even bought a USB wired network adapter and tried it that way, mistakenly believing the advice from some lunatic in one of the TiVo forums. When that didn’t work either, I finally tried my last resort, last-ditch, house-is-on-fire, plane’s-goin’-down option: I called tech support, something Brenda had suggested I do a couple days earlier.

Surprisingly, they were very helpful and were able to confirm that I had version 7.2 of the TiVo software pre-installed from the factory, and that this version does indeed support connecting to the TiVo service and performing the initial setup over an internet connection. Bolstered with that knowledge, I tried once more to connect, but with no luck. Same error, couldn’t find the DNS server that I knew to be functioning. But now, armed with the knowledge that this was supposed to work, I simply roamed around and found an open wireless router that one of my neighbors had set up, and I was in in five seconds. It seems that I often assume the worst about a situation and when I do, I overcomplicate the planned “solution”. Had I poked around the airwaves for an open router the first night, this would have all been over with in a very short time. Oh well.

Connected to my neighbor’s router, TiVo was able to phone home and get itself all configured. A day or two later, TiVo had performed an upgrade to the latest software version (v9.??) and I once again tried to connect to my own router, and this time it worked! I re-enabled WPA encryption and it still works! We are now scrolling through pages and pages of movies owing to the doubled hard drive space and the fact that all the old stuff I had saved on my old TiVo is now gone forever.

Long story short, if your new Series 2 TiVo is giving you a lot of guff about connecting to your router, try yer neighbor’s, let TiVo upgrade itself, and then try again on your own LAN. Happy surfing.

I’m so distraught, I put it into song:

The Night the TiVo Died
(sung to the tune of Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died”)

In the chill of a winter’s night
In the land of the yoga hippies
When Rob & Brenda’s TiVo died
And they talk about it still

When Rob arrived home from work
Brenda displayed a nervous quirk
She said “I have some bad news”
And then she gestured towards the tube

We heard Robbie cry
We heard him pray the night the TiVo died
Brother what a night it really was
Brother what a plight it really was
Live TV

We heard Robbie cry
We heard him pray the night the TiVo died
Brother what a night the people saw
Live TV and no pause
Yes indeed

And the box it would not light
What’s happened to the shows
And Rob considered his plight
And said “this really, really blows”

We heard Robbie cry
We heard him pray the night the TiVo died
Gonna miss stuff when I pee
Maybe it’s time we got HDTV
Glory Be…

Seriously; after almost four years, the damned thing just took a shit on us, and I’m now looking for the next thing to replace it.

Houston, we no longer have a problem. It was the damned channel button.

For the last several months, I have lived in a state of worry and emasculation, unable to get my “home theater system” fully operational. I tried several times, under varying levels of intoxication, to hook up this collection of black boxes and cable spaghetti in just the right way, so that the stuff would actually fucking work as advertised, to no avail. Inevitably, one or more things would not behave. Couple this with an untimely demise of our old DVD player (first it showed movies in black&white, then it started refusing to even play audio cds), and you have me down at the BestBuy looking at DVD recorders. Luckily, my friend Perry was able to recommend a decent DVD recorder that was reasonably priced and was purported to do what I need, namely, a device that I can save TiVo and VHS recordings to, as well as play music and DVDs. I picked one up. After much cursing, I finally got the damned thing hooked up and playing DVDs. But the recording thing was still not working. The whole thing is made more annoying by the fact that my A/V components live in this little cubby next to the tv that is barely wide enough to turn the components around so you can look at the cable connections for the eight hundredth time. I tried a few more times, I cursed some more, and after a definitive “fuck it all, goddammit all to hell, I’m fucking done with this bullshit”, we (I) settled for playback-only mode for the time being. That was a few weeks ago.

Then, on Thursday, the sound died. There was no warning, and I assure you I made no changes, but all of a sudden we stopped getting sound from the main TV. It was time to get this sorted.

And so on Saturday, I pulled the entire rack out and placed it on the dining room table, so I could plug component video cables, audio cables, rca jacks and speaker wires in and out and in and out until I either had a heart attack, an orgasm, or everything was working as planned.

And I got it. Everything was working. I could watch TV, or I could switch input sources and watch a movie from the vcr or the dvd player, and I could also get a TiVo signal through the DVD recorder.

Then I disassembled everything and stuffed it back into the cubby, violating rule number one of final assembly: I buttoned everything up nice and neat, as if I wouldn’t have to take it apart again. And so of course I was greeted by a blue screen when I was supposed to be watching a fucking DVD.

Well, it turns out that when you want to watch a TiVo recording through the vcr and through the dvd recorder, you need to set the vcr to channel 3 on the box, and hit tv/vcr on the vcr remote, set the input source to color stream on the TiVo remote, and then make sure the stereo is on and set to dvd so you have audio, and like fifty other things that I’ve already forgotten, and god help us when our cat walks on the remotes again.

So, I finally have the ability to save to DVD things I’ve recorded with TiVo. More on this later. In the meantime, DON’T TOUCH THE REMOTES! DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING! IT’S WORKING!!!!