So, apparently since the last DST change, my DirecTivo is confused about what time it is: it thinks it's an hour earlier than it really is. Fortunately, the program data is also off by an hour, so it's still mostly* recording the right things, but having the clock be wrong is annoying.

It's a hacked Philips 7000/17 S2 box (apparently running 4.0.1b-02-2-240), so I can't apply DirecTV's software update. Any idea how to fix this? There is no zoneinfo directory on the Tivo file system, so I don't know where its DST rules live. The clock is correct w.r.t. GMT, it just doesn't know what the new DST rules are.

I don't understand why this didn't happen last year. I think I would have noticed.

* It stopped recording The Daily Show at the proper time because I use a "manual" recording for that one (to stop getting a dozen copies of it a day when Comedy Central botches the metadata, which is often).

Dear Lazyweb,

TivoTool stopped working on 10.5, and mail to the author bounces. It's looking for this "CamelBones" library that no longer exists. I installed some newer version of it, but that didn't work either. What are my alternatives for getting video off my Tivo without an analog phase? (If you're going to point me at some forum page on tivocommunity or dealdatabase, please try harder: I can never figure out how to download shit from there.)

Update: So, here's one semi-horrible way:

To get the show ID number:
/Library/Application\ Support/TivoTool/vstream-client tivo://hostname/llist

To download that show as an MPEG2 file:
/Library/Application\ Support/TivoTool/vstream-client tivo://hostname/number -o tmp.ty
/Library/Application\ Support/TivoTool/vsplit -m tmp.ty filename unused

Cory writes:

Hey, TiVo: since 1984's Betamax decision, Americans have had the right to record TV shows even if the rightsholder doesn't like the idea. That's straight from the Supreme Court's mouth. I don't know what kind of special privilege the enteraintment industry has offered you in exchange for this spectacular display of wanton shark-jumping, but it wasn't enough.

The Tivo Fanboys are quick to point out that this particular instance is probably a mistake -- chances are they didn't really mean to put a 7-day expiration on a two-year-old syndicated re-run -- but that's really missing the point. After your appliance auto-upgrades to the 7.2 release, it will be less powerful than it was when you bought it.

Wired interviewed a Tivo weasel about this last year:

TiVo has always been about empowering the viewer. Why change now?
Macrovision changed its policy. So the question was, Do we want to have a Macrovision license with certain restrictions, or none at all?

You're not legally required to have copy protection. Why not tell Macrovision to stuff it?
That was an option. But if there was no Macrovision license, we would run into a lot of copyright problems with things like remote access and "TiVo to Go" functionality.

brad cancelled his Tivo and notes that that's a good way to get a discount:

Finally got off hold and got a confirmation number. But they gave me "one last offer before we make this official" (after a dozen other offers), which is a permanent monthly price of $6.95 instead of $12.95. So if you still like Tivo and want a discount..... there's your opportunity.

I have DirecTivo, and instead of just buying a new one when the drive died, I replaced the drive. But, in order to do that, you have no choice but to hack it and run a copy of the OS that has questionable legality; there's no other way to replace a dead drive and have the device still work. Because of this, my machine is permanently stuck at version 4 of the OS, so I don't have this new Macrovision "feature". But I know that someday, for some reason, I'm going to have to upgrade it (I expect that the hardware will fail and I will fall into a cascading upgrade dance that requires a version of the OS with these new misfeatures). I don't look forward to that day.

Dear Lazyweb,

What's the best way to get video from Tivo into iMovie and iDVD?

I found TivoTool, which (after I found a working binary of "vserver" to install on the Tivo) is a GUI app that shows you a list of the programs on Tivo and lets you download them in a few different formats, including MPEG2 and MPEG4 (but not DV).

So far, the only thing I've found that works reliably is:

• Use TivoTool to download MPEG-4 files;
• Use ffmpegX to convert from 480x480 MPEG-4 to 720x480 DV;
• Import that into iMovie in a "DV"-mode project.

Needless to say, this takes fucking forever, and (I think?) decodes and re-encodes the video three times along the way.

Once, iMovie (5.0.2) was able to load an MPEG-4 file directly, but it padded the image instead of stretching it, so I had a tall-and-thin 4:3 image with black bars on the left and right. But then I tried it again, and it wasn't able to import MPEG-4 at all. No idea what was different the second time.

QuickTime can play all of these files, but iMovie can't import them, which is just weird. Isn't this all the same library?

Also: I think my Tivo's USB port is running in USB-1 mode. Slow. I found this, which seems to be the USB-2 drivers, but I have no idea how to install/test them without risking putting the tivo into a non-bootable state (I don't have a serial console, so breaking the network would be Bad). Have any of you done this? I've got a Philips DirecTivo 7000/17 with kernel 2.4.18. The USB-to-Ethernet dongle I'm using is a Linksys USB200M.

Update: I wonder if I'd be better off just going through the "analog hole": pressing Play on Tivo and letting iMovie import the DV from that (I have a Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge which converts analog audio/video to Firewire DV). Is one analog-mode decode/encode step notably worse than three digital-mode decode/recodes? It sure would be faster...

Update 2: A friend who works at Tivo says: "I have every l33t tool available, and I still use the analog hole. The minor difference in video quality just isn't worth the huge amount of additional effort." So, yeah, that's what I'm going to do from now on. Screw it.

Since I'll be needing a new video projector soon, I've been toying with the idea of swapping out my 4:3 projection screen for a wider one, and the whole aspect ratio thing has me completely puzzled.

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I think my projector is about to die. It's doing this weird flickery thing, and sometimes looks like it's rendering in 8-bit mode -- and it does this even when there's no video signal plugged in, so it's not cabling or something.

So I suspect I'll be in the market for a new one soon. What do you suggest?

Currently I have an NEC LT-260, and I've been pretty satisifed with it, though I wish it were a lot brighter and the bulbs lasted longer. It's 2100 lumens.

I don't have any HD gear, but I do use component video.

I've had extremely bad luck with InFocus gear in the past, so those are pre-vetoed.

Intended uses: DirecTivo, PS2 games, DVDs, in roughly that order.

Placement: 16' from the projector to the screen; screen is 80"×58" (4:3, 100" diagonal.)

Though if I could use a new projector as an excuse to upgrade to a wider screen (e.g., 16:9 = 100"×58", or 1.85:1 = 107"×58") that would be... compelling.

Where can I find an sshd for Tivo 4.x series 2? (  --More--( 8%)  )
Update: Found Tivo sshd here, yay! It works, even.

Because of my recent Tivo adventures, I've had to re-enter my season passes twice. Since I wrote it down the second time, I figured I might as well post it, in the form of micro-reviews. "jwz uses and endorses television."

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Well that was fun -- not. jungar and I just spent five hours trying to upgrade my Philips DirecTivo with the dead disk. We got it to boot, but when I had DTV re-activate the card, it wasn't able to get signal on any channel other than 100. So I'm back on the R10 again with the blurry-as-hell video output. Grrr.

Update, 2 Apr: The problem was that the 7000 is not an RID box, and I thought it was. Reinstalling and leaving out the hacked "dssapp" made it go.

Dear Lazyweb,

How do I configure my DirecTV DVR R10 (DirecTivo Series 2) to phone home using the Linksys USB200M ethernet adapter plugged into its USB port, instead of insisting on a land line?

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Update: Ok, I think the plan now is to try and put a new drive in the Philips and return the R10. The R10 DRM is egregious. Also (I'm not totally sure about this but) I think the picture is less sharp on the R10 than it was on the Philips: maybe the R10 has a piece-of-shit S/Video encoder?

Well, I had another DirecTivo die, I think. I swear, these fuckers come with a two-year self-destruct timer built in. The last time this happened was in Sep 2003, so I suppose it's out of warranty, even if I knew where the receipt was, which I don't.

Right now it's doing a full reformat, at the suggestion of the support guy (which takes four hours), but he didn't sound hopeful.

It started acting like the load was really high (playback and background animation stalling for seconds at a time) and after I reset it, it wouldn't ever get past 70% on the satellite info stage. I suppose it might just be a dying drive, but (as you know) I hate computers, and so I'd gladly spend an extra $200 to not have to figure out how to install/bless/format a new $50 drive.

I briefly pondered whether maybe getting digital cable might not be so bad, but then I remembered that A) the cable-company-approved PVRs suck, and B) that'd leave me with one tuner instead of two. The Tivo GUI is really nice.

Are any of the DirecTivo models reputed to be more reliable than any other? This one was a Philips 7000/17. The previous one (that died in a similar way) was a Sony something.

Are there any models o DirecTivo that can be made to use ethernet instead of a phone line, without requiring surgery?

Before I reformatted it, I wasn't even able to get it to show me my season pass listings, so I'm going to have to redo them all from memory, dammit.

Those of you with Tivo may have noticed an irritating trend that the networks have started, of marking hour long shows as being 61 minutes long in the schedule. That extra minute will make Tivo skip recording a show on another channel that started in the following hour.

ABC is unapologetic. "It's not my job to make it easy for people to leave our network," says ABC scheduling chief Jeff Bader. "Our whole goal is to get people to stay with us from 8 to 11."

Update: In the comments below, a lot of you are missing the point. One problem would be if a show was actually 61 minutes long and marked in the schedule as 60 (then you fail to record the last minute.) The more annoying problem is when the show is actually marked as being 61 minutes long, because that extra minute causes a scheduling conflict in the following time slot. Dual tuners help with this, but only if there are not two things you wanted to record in timeslot two (the 61 minute timeslot one show will bump one of them.)

Tivo currently has no feature that lets you say "stop recording at 9:00pm instead of 9:01pm", except by using "record by time" instead of a season pass subscription, which is bogus in several ways.

The makers of TiVo and ReplayTV digital video recorders have agreed to limit how long consumers can keep pay-for-view movies stored on future versions of the VCR-like devices.

The new technology also will allow Hollywood movie studios and broadcasters to regulate how often movies purchased through pay-for-view services can be watched. Digital video recorders that recognize these new copy restrictions will begin appearing in the spring of 2005.

Fred von Lohmann, senior attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, described the technology as anti-consumer. ``Consumers are not the ones who are asking for this so-called feature. And I hope that the marketplace will respond by punishing TiVo and Replay and others that do this.''

One control would limit recording to 90 minutes -- essentially enough time for a viewer to watch an on-demand movie. Another would allow a movie to be stored for up to seven days but once the film was started it must be viewed within 24 hours. Another would allow unlimited viewing within a seven-day period.

Looks like my Tivo problems were not solved by allowing it to phone the mothership: it's back to being slow again.

I wonder if this means the disk is going bad... *sob*

Update: The Tivo is dead. Long live the Tivo.

I tried a bunch of things, and eventually did a "factory reset" to see if that would fix it (basically wiping the disk and starting over.) When reinitializing, it got stuck at 28% every time while "contacting satellite". I actually called tech support and they had me try a few other power-cycley voodoo tricks, but finally the guy said, "you're screwed, man. It's dead."

So I got a new one (series 2.) Maybe I'll recycle the old one as a kiosk for the club...

Apparently the USB ports on the new models aren't really used for anything; you can put an ethernet on it and will (soon) be able to use your Tivo to stream MP3s from a file server, but what good is that, really?

My agent inside the Tivo Collective tells me that getting a shell on a series 2 requires opening the case and mucking around, and isn't worth it anyway because there's not actually interesting you can do with it once you do.

So, a while ago (94 days ago, to be exact) I unplugged my DirecTivo from the phone line, since I decided that there was really no compelling reason to submit to tracking (anonymized though they claim it to be.) Since it's a DSS model, it gets its program listings from the satellite, so the only thing the phone line is used for is to deliver the keypress logs back to the mothership. (And, presumably, auto-downloading new software updates someday, which I'm not terribly interested in.)

After about a week, it started getting anxious, and once a night it would tell me "unable to make a call for N days! phone home! phone home!" I ignored it, and everything was fine for months. Until a few days ago, when all of the sudden, Tivo lost its little mind: navigating around in the "now playing" menu would take up to a minute for each click, and even the background animations were getting jerky. Recording and playback of video, and ffwd/rw within the video were working fine, but the menus were damned near unusable. I guess it filled up its log files and was swapping or something. I tried rebooting it, in the hopes that that would make it rotate its logs out, but no.

So finally I plugged the phone line in and let it phone home; that didn't fix it. But a second call followed by another reboot seems to have brought it back to life.

I find this terribly irritating: I had to let it phone home because there was no easy way for me to just go in there and delete the damned log file. It almost (almost) makes me want to crack the thing open and put an ethernet card in there, but I'm just not ready for that kind of pain. Also, if I broke it, I would be so very, very sad.

Update: Not fixed! Eek!

1. Somehow I have missed last week's episodes of both 24 and Angel. Tivo, why hast thou forsaken me?

2. The convenient coincidences and ham-handed forshadowing in 24 make me really angry. Very nearly throw-things-at-the-TV angry. But at least Jack's god damned daughter wasn't in the latest episode at all.

3. I think that in the last few episodes, Penn and Teller have been spending less time showing "these commonly held beliefs are bullshit" and more time showing "some people who believe these things are inarticulate and not very bright." It's disappointing, because they didn't fall back on that tactic so much in the earlier episodes.

4. Faith is a bit less annoying now than she was the first time around. But still pretty annoying.

5. Even though Firefly is no more, it's good to see that Nathan Fillion and Gina Torres have gotten transferred over to the Buffyverse. They both do evil really well!

Why is there no regularly-updated Tivo Zeitgeist page, like the Google Zeitgeist?

Tivo reports oscars viewing behavior

The war-related comments by Oscar winners Michael Moore and Adrien Brody were the most replayed part Sunday's Academy Awards broadcast, according to TiVo, the personal video recorder technology company.

The single most paused or freeze-framed event of the live show was the stage entrance of presenter Julia Roberts.

[...] TiVo also reported that viewership dropped off heavily during commercials in the Oscars show, but speculated that this was because viewers were using commercial breaks to tune into other sources of news programming to follow the dramatic events of the war in Iraq. [yeah, right!]

The measurement of audience behavior was based on a review of 10,000 of TiVo anonymous subscribers' viewing patterns during the broadcast.

No stats on fast-forwarding? This article seems to imply that all of these people were watching the show live, which I would never do. After your first week with Tivo you catch on that there's no benefit at all to watching TV live instead of time-shifted, because that just means that you can't fast-forward.

I hadn't realized they collected stats on pausing, etc. That must be a lot of data. But I guess it compresses well.

"That's probably not an unusual finding based on the way people recall things," Mr. Schar said. "People hardly recall anything. So you're dealing with low numbers anyway, and differences with low numbers take a lot to be significant." [...]

P&G has in the past shared other TiVo research that found only about a third of TiVo users actually fast-forward through ads, (!!!) though fast-forwarding becomes more frequent the longer people use the PVR technology.

LAS VEGAS -- The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is a new convert -- to the personal digital video recorder faithful. "My favorite product that I got for Christmas is TiVo," FCC chairman Michael Powell said during a question and answer session at the International Consumer Electronics Show. "TiVo is God's machine."

If Powell's enthusiasm for digital recordings of TV broadcasts are reflected in FCC rulings, the entertainment industry could find it difficult to push in Washington its agenda for technical restrictions on making and sharing such recordings.

Powell said he intended to use the TiVo machine to record TV shows to play on other television sets in his home, and even suggested that he might share recordings with his sister if she were to miss a favorite show. "I'd like to move it to other TVs," he said of his digitally recorded programming. A number of products already allow that. [...]

By Andrew Smith

Users of the TiVo digital video recorder have reacted angrily to a new sponsorship feature that automatically records certain programmes, adverts and other promotional material.

[...] viewers in the UK were surprised this week to find that the second episode of the little-known BBC sitcom "Dossa and Joe" had been recorded without their knowledge and added to the system's main menu screen.

They were even more surprised to find that they won't be allowed to delete the programme for one week, and that more sponsored recordings are on the way.

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