TiVo’s simple magic changed TV forever—now the iconic DVR is fading into history.
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As someone who paid $500 USD for the lifetime pass and went through 3 TiVo units over 20 years: So long and thanks for all the ad-free moments.
I will never forgive TiVo for opening the door on Linux DRM (“Tivoization”).
I abandoned my TiVo in 2021 when I went to update my box that had been in storage for too long. There was no incremental update available, I would have had to send the box to TiVo for them to update it for me.
I connected my Roku that had been in storage even longer and it updated itself without any issues. It took me longer to contact TiVo customer support than it did for my Roku to update itself.
While we loved our TiVo boxes while we had them, and they were ground breaking technology, they stagnated. TiVo never kept up technically.
Bleep bloop bye
Seems like they were always behind on things like that. I had a friend that would come over to my house to update his TiVo because I still had a landline and it required a dial-up connection. This was in 2005, well after the decline of dial-up.
I bought my first TiVo back in… 2002?
I had to use my work landline to do the initial setup, but then I used a USB Ethernet jack for the rest. You had to do some fancy remote secret code, but it worked just fine.
Also was able to use disc mirroring to make a new, much larger, hard drive, so we could record essentially unlimited TV.
remembering the early days of tivo desktop when they had no form of drm and you could just save programs to disk and share them
TiVo was the “VCR code in the TV Guide” for the early digital age.
I had a VCR and remember tv guide. What did these codes do.
Later model VCRs had a thing where they kept a list of shortcuts for time/channel/length. The eight (ten?) digit code, you’d just plug that into the VCR and you didn’t have to program all the details.
It was a standard system for setting up a VCR to record your selected program, because every VCR was different. I believe you connected the VCR to a phone line and it would dial out to get new codes? It was sort of like DNS (really like a distributed HOSTS file), but for media recording instead of websites.
You just unlocked a buried memory of the VCR with the barcode-reader-in-the-remote method of setting record-times.
They out here trying everything in the 90s.
NV-F65 and NV-FS88
o7
There has to be a way to set up an HDMI Smart hub with open source software to replace the tv software. I don’t have cable.
A HDHomerun and Jellyfin. You have to subscribe to SchedulesDirect though for the listings.
