<sigh> Tivo, here I come?

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STC

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#101

Post by STC » Tue Sep 13, 2016 12:52 pm

But bob_p the data still has a long way to go to worksville. You can wait a little while longer to see if they do manage to make it good?

The plus didn't really push any of my buttons. I may try it in the future if Rovi get it together. In their present state I'm steering well clear.
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#102

Post by Ed  » Tue Sep 13, 2016 3:19 pm

Enjoy Bob :)
STC wrote: $549 "All-in" (but not Lifetime)
All in is lifetime, the article you're quoting is wrong/made a typo. Noticed that yesterday when I read it on Engadget or something.

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#103

Post by STC » Tue Sep 13, 2016 6:07 pm

Of course, 'Enjoy Bob!' I used to do TiVo. Still have my TiVoHD ready to rock for emergencies if WMC goes bang.

Just make sure you're not going out of the frying pan into the fire here, especially with WAF....
Over on tivocommunity a lot of members are complaining about the guide data.
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#104

Post by Scallica » Tue Sep 13, 2016 6:15 pm

STC wrote:Just make sure you're not going out of the frying pan into the fire here, especially with WAF....
Over on tivocommunity a lot of members are complaining about the guide data.
Yep, the new Tivo Bolt has the "shiny, shiny" factor, but Tivo boxes not without their issues. Exhibit A:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/fo ... ay.php?f=4
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#105

Post by adam1991 » Tue Sep 13, 2016 7:18 pm

Great assessment. As you point out, it's just math. And the simple fact is, pay TV and/or DVR has hardware costs associated with it, period. Just do the math.

I think if you don't like the Bolt experience, you shouldn't have any problem selling it and getting a decent bit of your money back.

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#106

Post by STC » Tue Sep 13, 2016 11:34 pm

JoeKustra@TiVoCommunity.com wrote:I could be wrong, but it does seem that this process was implemented by people who didn't know the Rovi guide, didn't know TiVo guide, and never used a TiVo as 99% of the rest of us have. I wonder if those boxes used by MSO providers are enjoying this? There was y2k fears, then chaos with analog to digital conversion, now we can add Rovi buying TiVo to the list of screw-ups in our digital world.

But at least our boxes aren't exploding.
BobCamp1 wrote: If someone doesn't want to read all these posts, the guide transition can be summarized by the phrase "hot mess."
slowbiscuit wrote:The difference here is that we're all paying for it. Either with lifetime service or with monthly, we're now getting much worse than what we paid for before.

All of the other complaints about missing features and bugs could be rationalized away by Tivo, but this one issue cannot. They have to get this fixed soon or they will see big problems with their paying userbase.
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#107

Post by STC » Wed Sep 14, 2016 5:54 pm

Poor buggers.... :(
L David Matheny wrote: TiVo is taking on water, and employees are busy manning the pumps. When I was in the Navy I saw a sign over someone's desk that said (paraphrasing slightly):

It is the duty of every good manager to anticipate all problems, plan appropriate solutions, and act quickly to implement those solutions when the need arises; however, when you're up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp.

That example may not be environmentally correct these days, but it illustrates how priorities can change. I suspect that many TiVo employees are operating in that mode right now.
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#108

Post by bob_p » Thu Sep 15, 2016 5:44 pm

Ordered a Bolt+ and 3 Minis this morning - which will replace most of our WMC environment (which has 6 Xbox 360 extenders).

Our WMC box has an SD HDHR Prime and a Ceton - so we have 7 tuners, and have never run out of tuners to watch live TV or record multiple programs at the same time. With only 4 tuners, we probably would have needed two Bolts - which would have cost us an additional $250 per year for the TiVo subscription and Comcast cablecard. With 6 tuners in the Bolt+, that will hopefully be enough for us - and only need a single $250 TiVo/Comcast payment.

We plan to give this a try for a few weeks - and if it isn't acceptable, we'll return everything to TiVo.

I have a pretty complete evaluation spreadsheet I developed for use in testing of the SD DVR (which still hasn't happened, because of all the functionality still missing in the DVR software). I'll post the results of the evaluation, for the benefits of other long time WMC users.

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#109

Post by STC » Thu Sep 15, 2016 8:08 pm

May the force be with you.
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#110

Post by mdavej » Thu Sep 15, 2016 8:20 pm

Welcome to the dark side Bob. It has been a rough couple of weeks with Rovi. But we've seen major improvements in the past few days. Rovi data is a lot worse than Gracenote to be sure, but it's had little or no real impact on me. If they have your lineup right (you can check on tvguide.com), then you should be in relatively good shape.

One thing Tivo does out of the box is record everything under the sun automatically based on your likes (Suggestions). I personally can't stand this, so I turn it off right away. But others really like it.

In addition to gaining live buffers on every tuner that you can record from the beginning, comm skip, streaming apps and logos, I love being able to un-delete. I've been able to recover things I had deleted nearly a year ago. And you're going to love the performance of Minis compared to WMC extenders. They're fast and reliable. I can't say there's anything I miss about WMC.

Let us know how you like the new Bolt+. Looks like a nice machine.

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#111

Post by adam1991 » Thu Sep 15, 2016 8:30 pm

mdavej wrote:One thing Tivo does out of the box is record everything under the sun automatically based on your likes (Suggestions).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoUJvAQg7KI

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#112

Post by STC » Thu Sep 15, 2016 8:38 pm

I miss thumbs :(
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#113

Post by mdavej » Thu Sep 15, 2016 8:42 pm

adam1991 wrote:
mdavej wrote:One thing Tivo does out of the box is record everything under the sun automatically based on your likes (Suggestions).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoUJvAQg7KI
:lol: :lol: :lol:

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#114

Post by boogmeister1 » Thu Sep 15, 2016 10:20 pm

I'm glad somebody likes the mini's. When MS switched over to Rovi, we decided to give Tivo a try. The wife had been fine with it... that is, until the Rovi switch over. The biggest problem with the Tivo is the mini. Ours run so incredibly slow! It will literally take 30-60 seconds for a show to start playing and then another 30-60 seconds to bring up the menu for the EPG or the recorded shows. I have changed our switches out and rebooted countless times and they still work like crud. (To be honest, though, they were ok until Tivo pushed out an update a few months ago.) I have been so disappointed with the mini's that I built up a new WMC machine with EPG123 and have been running my old DMA2100's. They are so much faster. Right now I'm running the WMC and Tivo side by side for comparison and the WMC/extenders are much faster and the EPG is dead on. It may just turn out that the Tivo is relegated to the closet and the WMC is brought out of retirement for as long as the EPG123 works.

Eric

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#115

Post by mdavej » Thu Sep 15, 2016 10:58 pm

My Minis are nearly the same speed as my main Tivo. You must have had some network issues. I've read that turning off IGMP snooping in your router can do the trick sometimes.

All mine are on Moca (~280Mbps) and the guide is up before my finger is off the button. My Echoes were also fairly quick, but would have network issues and lose pairing now and then. My Minis never have any issues. My problem with DMA's was they couldn't do WOL, which was important since my HTPC was sleeping most of the time.

I am jealous of EPG123. Wish we had that option on Tivo.

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#116

Post by dkrom » Thu Sep 15, 2016 11:37 pm

I just launch the My MC app before staring my DMA - it does WOL.

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#117

Post by STC » Fri Sep 16, 2016 12:49 am

When I was testing the last batch of Roamio + minis the minis worked well on a basic switched network. The GUI was a little slower and less polished but playback was pretty instant.

Also in other news I'm led to believe new minis are not far off. Maybe at CES.
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#118

Post by bob_p » Thu Sep 22, 2016 12:05 pm

We've started our 30 day trial of our new TiVo Bolt+ and 3 Minis - as a possible replacement for WMC 8.1 and our Xbox 360 extenders, and will post a more thorough review when we've completed the evaluation.

The commercial skipping works very well, compared to WMC. While we had WMC configured to automatically skip commercials, with the TiVo (for the prime time programs on the popular channels), we have to hit a button on the remote to skip over the commercials. And, the commercials are marked within minutes after a program completes airing. While we'll miss the automatic skipping, having to use on button on the remote to skip isn't bad - and still much easier than having to manually skip over a block of commercials.

The Bolt and Mini boxes do not have an off/standby button. This means once you start using one of them, a tuner is allocated per active device - and will keep using that tuner for several hours. The TiVo software will steal a tuner, if it needs it for a higher priority activity - but this feature does mean the Bolt will have tuners busy for inactive devices and making temporary recordings for the live TV buffering. While it is possible to force the boxes to go into "standby" mode by a sequence of 5 button presses, that only turns off the display and doesn't appear to free up the tuner. Will have to do more testing on this when we get all 3 Minis installed - and see how well this works when the Bolt+ runs out of tuners.

The Bolt's "Quick Mode" works better than WMC - allowing you to watch a program at 1.3x speed with audio. It's enabled once by pressing the "Play" button and then "Select" - and stays enabled for the rest of the program. With WMC, the "quick mode" gets disabled every time you do a commercial skip - and has to be re-enabled.

The TiVo recording management is different than WMC - with their "OnePass" feature - for some reason, when I set up the first recording rules - it wasn't recording any of the programs - but after I deleted those and entered them a second time, they seem to be working correctly. We immediately turned of the Suggested Recordings feature, since we only want to record the programs we pick - not extra episodes/programs we don't intend to watch.

Integration of Netflix, Amazon Prime, VuDu, Plex and Xfinity's On Demand is pretty good. With Plex, was able to watch programs previously recorded on our WMC box, plus downloaded/personal videos along with viewing pictures and playing music. With the other streaming services, we're able to watch 4K programs without having to load up the TV's smart apps. Plus, TiVo's search searches the program database combined across Xfinity and all of the streaming services (giving you the option of which service to use to watch a program). The only negative is that browsing for Xfinity's On Demand is not as nice as the X1 DVR service, but that's probably not going to be a major problem.

TiVo's Android app is a significant improvement over the combination of Remote Potato and Plex that we have been using to watch live and recorded TV on our devices at and away from home. We were never able to get Remote Potato to work reliably on live TV. With the TiVo app, it automatically sets up a recording of the live TV program and begins streaming that program to your mobile device - even when we're away from home. This is something that the Xfinity app will not do outside of the home, except for a few of the channels that have streaming services. The live TV feature will be very useful to watch live sports programs when we're not at home or travelling. The major negative of the Android app is that it restricts downloading to the device's built-in storage and doesn't allow use of the SD card (which always has much more room), so it looks like we'll probably use Plex for downloading and have to get software working to copy the TiVo programs to our PC running the Plex server - when we want to watch programs offline (like on an airplane or in a hotel, without a high speed or reliable network).

While we're used to the WMC environment - and it has worked well for many years, at least our initial impression of the TiVo Bolt+ is pretty positive.

Our plan is to use it for 3 weeks - and then make a GO/NO-GO decision about keeping it and permanently moving off our WMC PC and Xbox hardware.

Would still prefer to have more control over our DVR environment - and if WMC was still being developed & supported or either SD's DVR or Plex's DVR were clearly on a path to provide functionality comparable to WMC, we would likely have waited longer to make this decision. But, unfortunately neither SD or Plex appears close to having enough functionality for us to seriously consider...

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#119

Post by Scallica » Thu Sep 22, 2016 12:13 pm

^How's the quality/accuracy of the guide data?
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#120

Post by webminster » Thu Sep 22, 2016 1:59 pm

Scallica wrote:^How's the quality/accuracy of the guide data?
Was going to ask the same thing, in view of the Rovi switch... one reason I delayed on evaluating the same combo.
Since you mention Plex, how does the embedded Plex client compare feature-wise? I understand the Plex client on the Minis is lower res (720p, 4mb/s bitrate), and rumors about some 1 hour limit on some streams... is it? I keep wavering on whether Plex on TiVo is viable, or to assume I'll still need my Rokus to do good Plex.
-Alan

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