I’m actually watching a sporting event on TV right now … well, slightly time shifted, as it’s recording on the the TiVo.
I’m watching (as you might have guessed) the Tour de France.
I’m honestly not following most the technical details, but it’s kind of interesting.
Unfortunately, the detached perspective of watching on TV makes it hard to judge the significance of various aspects … like speed, climbs, head winds, etc.
Still, kind of interesting. I’ll keep watching for a while.
Thursday, I had a very disturbing experience with Tivo customer service.
In the past, on the rare instances where I had to call Tivo’s customer service department, I’ve always had a very pleasent experience … my problem or question was cleared up right away with minimum of fuss & bother.
Last Thursday, however, that trend was broken … not once, but twice.
For some reason, Tivo has been recording a lot of old SF shows recently.
A lot of these shows I’ve been fans of in the past … Star Trek: The Next Generation, Highlander, Seven Days, etc.
As I watch these shows I’m amazed at how bad they are. I’m truly amazed that I considered these shows good at one point. I was actually a fan of many of them.
Now I find the acting wooden, the special effects primitive, and the plots flat.
Of course some of the shows I thought were bad initially are still just as bad … like Star Trek Voyager (then why do I still watch it on occasion?).
Maybe it’s old age? I wonder if, as time goes by, I’ll start considering some of the shows I like now to be just as bad?
Last November we got a new Tivo HD … and one of my gripes about the new unit was it’s lack of a standby button.
Since we pipe the audio output of the Tivo through our stereo tuner, shutting off the TV didn’t stop the sound from coming out of the stereo. The solution was to put the Tivo into standby. Our Series 2 Tivo had a nice little Standby button that did that right quick. The new Tivo HD replaced the Standby button with a button to change the video aspect ratio. Nice if you actually have a HD TV (which we don’t, yet) but not so handy if you have a standard TV.
Well, after googling around a bit I finally found a perfect solution on TivoCommunity.
Just multi-task the power button.
To do this, hold down the “Tivo” and Power buttons until the LED stays lit, then enter the same code you used when programming the remote for volume. Now, when you push the power button on the Tivo remote, it shuts both the TV and the stereo off.
Works perfectly.
We got a new Tivo box a few weeks ago … Tivo was running a promotion where you could buy a new Tivo Series 3 (HD) and transfer a lifetime subscription to the new box. As an added bonus, you could keep the old box running for a year.
Needless to say, it was not a hard decision. Although we currently do not have a HD TV, I suspect it’s just a mater of time before we get one.
The new unit arrived about 2 weeks ago … and I found a small problem. The new unit lacked the ability to control an external cable box via a RS232 cable. The old one had this ability. The new unit uses Cable Card(s) to decode & tune the cable signal. So I had to call Comcast to arrange to get a cable card (or two) installed. It took about a week to get Comcast out here … but they came out and installed a multi-stream cable card. Oddly enough, they arrived early and got the job done relatively fast.
Two nice things about using a cable card …
The new Tivo has a few other nice features …
My only real gripe about the new unit is that the “Standby” button is gone. We used to push this button to put the unit to sleep … although it didn’t really go to sleep. It just shut off the audio & video feed to the TV. I can still put the unit into standby, but it takes 3 to 4 menu options to do it. If we don’t put the unit into standby, eventually it will automatically switch to live TV. Since we feed the audio through our stereo, that can be annoying.
Our options on this are to a) Use the menus to put the unit into standby, or b) mute the sound and turn off the TV while leaving the Tivo on. Neither is very handy. I called Tivo support and conveyed my disappointment.
Other than that, I really like the new Tivo. Maybe for the holidays Ginny and I will get a HD TV. The only big problem is that our current TV works fine. Oh well, maybe figure out something to do with it.
Of course now I have to figure out what to do with the old Tivo. 🙂
Could be … could very well be.