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First thoughts on Series 2 TiVos

After some initial setbacks (had to take the box to a friend's house to use his phone line, which required 3 forced calls to pick up the 4.0 OS), the SuperTivo project is finally underway and I'm enjoying the new Series 2 features. In the past few hours of tinkering, here are some highlights and lowlights of the new system:

highlights

The new 34-button remote makes an already great tool even better. They've added a few new buttons, including a TV input button and info buttons, and a single remote can now power two different systems in a house.

My favorite new feature on the remote is the finer-grained "universal" remote control capabilities. In the past, the power/mute/volume buttons could be programmed to control the TV. The problem was, once I got a home theater system, I stopped using the TV's built in speakers altogether and those two buttons became useless on the Tivo remote. So that forced me to use two remotes at all times, one to turn on the TV and control tivo, the other to control the volume and system input. I wanted to get down to one remote and almost sprang for a whole Pronto system.

My prayers were answered with the new remote. I can have the tv power button work the power on my tv, but the mute and volume buttons work with my home theater setup. I can finally go down to one remote, and it even works with my home theater system that offered almost nothing in terms of codes for its universal remote.

Other things I noticed right away were the Now Showing list has sort options which enables you to make Groups (folders) to organize shows. That'll be great when I've got 50-100 things in the list.

Getting the Tivo onto my open, wireless network was fairly smooth, and updates after switching to the network were very quick and started happening automatically every 30 minutes or so.

lowlights

One problem I found after changing to a network setup: when repeating guided setup, the tivo box still tries to use a modem even though I'm successfully connected to a wireless network. I couldn't escape the guided setup's failed phone calls until I added the backdoor network dialing prefix. When your call fails, you have to change dialing prefix, telling it to use ,#401, or [pause] [enter] 4 0 1. Then it connected in seconds and finished setup. I shouldn't have to know how to complete this hack for a network-connected Tivo.

A couple hours ago, I purchased the Home Media Option for it, but so far forced connections haven't seemed to download and install the software yet (though the box is going through its first batch of network data, which warned me that it'd take 4-8 hours to complete first). When I've got the HMO running, I'll post a full review.

Next up for this project is adding in the second 120Gb hard drive and Weaknees Twinbreeze upgrade bracket and parts.

by Matt Haughey July 20, 2003 in SuperTiVo Project, TiVo

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