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How do I make my VCR/DVD work with my TiVo?

Is there no way to get Tivo to work with a Cable box?

  • Does Tivo removing the IR output from series 3 machines upwards leave us screwed to use a cable box? Is there any way for a series 3/4 Tivo to control a digital cable box, and if not, what are our options? Ok, so this may be complicated and need some clarification from me, but I'll try. Two part question, with (um) sub sections of clarification to aid responses, hopefully : 1: How do we make a HD Tivo work with our cable box? (given the following parameters): a: We have a HD cable box with Rogers in Canada. There is no such thing as a cablecard from Rogers or any other Canadian cable provider according to the information we can find (and yes, we have called them). Therefore we can't use the slot in the series 4 (or 3, it looks like) for a cable card to control the channel changing. b: So you think that we could plug in the IR lead and Blaster that we have to let the Tivo change the channel like it used to with our series 2, right? Wrong. There is no IR output on the series 4 premiere we had delivered and it seems that series 3 are the same way. This leaves us with a HD cable box that would need to be manually changed to suit the Tivo's recording schedule. This makes the thing useless, from our perspective. Is this a valid conclusion? Are there no USB adaptors for the Tivo that can do this? c: Our conclusion from this is that without a cable card, there is no method for getting a Tivo HD to work given our cable company limitations. Is this correct? 2: Is there a realistic alternative to Tivo without losing either all or some of the convenience of season passes, wish list search style recording or that ability to talk to our two other Tivos in order to transfer recordings back and forth. a: Is there a service that is as good and comparable (has to be available in Canada) yet would work with our cable box? b: Rogers PVR seems to be one option, but if we can't store the recordings in a manner that makes it accessible by our other means (ie backing up to a server and streaming from there to our HD TV, for instance) then it loses it's shine. We're not sure how easy it is to transfer recordings from there. c: What other services are on a par (or close) with Tivo and offer the same kind of back up/network access? We're sending out Series 4 Premiere Tivo back and are pretty disgusted they removed perfectly good IR functionality that has to completely crippled us, but we'd like to find a way not to make the whole thing a waste of time.

  • Answer:

    c: Our conclusion from this is that without a cable card, there is no method for getting a Tivo HD to work given our cable company limitations. Is this correct? Yes. We're sending out Series 4 Premiere Tivo back and are pretty disgusted they removed perfectly good IR functionality that has to completely crippled us They didn't remove "perfectly good" IR functionality — they removed the video inputs and then removed the totally useless IR functionality! The HD TiVo can't get the compressed digital data from the cable box, so it would have to take the video in on component or HDMI and recompress it on the fly, on 2 channels — that would take a lot of CPU and be a more expensive device.

Brockles at Ask.Metafilter.Com Visit the source

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I guess the confusing thing - the thing Brockles is trying to understand - is that the series 2 Tivo will change channels on the HD cable box with the IR, no trouble, and record things from it (including things on the HD channels), no trouble. It's just not great quality, of course.

routergirl

Not that this will help you, but http://www.compton.net/digitaltv/digitalterminals.html in Uxbridge supports HD TiVos. I believe they're using CableCard in their units. Unfortunately there's just no incentive for the larger cable companies to support them.

howling fantods

routergirl, the point of nicwolff's answer actually answers that question. Up through Series 2 the TiVO DVR would actually capture video from its inputs, encode it and then write it to disk. Doing this with an SD signal or even doing it with HD but not encoding it at an HD quality. Series 3 and greater don't actually "capture" video off an input. They just decrypt the digital signal and write it directly to disk, no encoding etc. That's why they also don't have any way to take video in, the only input is for a coax cable. Nic's point there was even if you had an IR blaster, to control the channel changing, how would you record the cable box's video output? There's no video in on the TiVO.

bitdamaged

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