My wife and I are TV junkies. I have seven TiVo DVRs (Digital Video Recorders), four of which have dual tuners. Lemme ‘splain.
I have two HD TiVos, each of which has two tuners. On these two boxes, one records ABC and CBS, the other does NBC and Fox. With a separate tuner for each network, we rarely have to forego one show to see another. However…
The HD DVRs, bought in December 2009, have had problems. On multiple occasions, one or the other crashed and lost all recordings. Therefore, of the remaining (non-HD) DVRs, four of them are used to record ABC/CBS/NBC/Fox as backups (recording from analog, not digital cable). If the HDs bite the dust or fail to get a recording, I fall back to the non-HD version of the show.
Another non-HD TiVo is primarily for SyFy. We have USA, TNT and other cable channels programmed wherever the DVR doesn’t have a higher priority show to record. Usually, I program the Season Pass on more than one machine to be sure we get it.
There are two Mac programs that I use daily to transfer recordings from and to the DVRs (More from than to). iTiVo allows me to access my Now Playing list on any TiVo and select recordings to transfer to my Mac. This program also allows one to “subscribe” to shows such that any new recordings of that show are transferred automatically with no need for me to select it for transfer.
As a result of the problems I’ve had with the HD models losing all recordings, I have two G5 Mac towers each with a 2-TB drive, dedicated to backing up each HD TiVo. Each runs 24×7 and is subscribed to all shows on the respective DVR. So, as soon as a recording is complete, it is backed up to the respective G5 Mac.
Twice since implementing this backup scheme I have had to restore recordings from a G5 Mac to one of the DVRs. For that, I use pyTiVo, a Python based server app that allows a TiVo DVR to transfer programs from a Mac to itself. (TiVo has the ability to transfer recordings from other TiVo DVRs.)
This setup also allows me to archive recordings off the TiVo for viewing later. I like to collect all episodes of a series, then view them marathon fashion.
Because many a series in syndication does not air in the original order, I have a number of scripts I’ve written to massage the metadata files that accompany each recording such that when transferred back to TiVo for that marathon, they’re in the right order.
About the HD TiVo crashing… The first thing I do with every TiVo I buy is remove the original hard drive and put in a larger one. As noted earlier, the tools for this are Linux and Windows based. Since I don’t do Windows, I use the Linux based tools.
Because I fiddle with the TiVo innards, I cannot say for certain that the crashing problems I’ve had are not caused by yours truly. With every new drive I buy, whether for Mac or TiVo, I burn it in, writing zeroes to it with Disk Utility and testing it every which way with Disk Utility and Techtool Pro. Because the Linux tools used to copy the TiVo OS to a new drive overwrites the partition map, I typically finished the new drive testing and burn-in with the drive in Mac OS extended filesystem form.
It may well be that the Linux tools do not thoroughly overwrite the partition map and that artifacts from its residency in a Mac persist in a drive later placed into a TiVo DVR. If the TiVo OS sees and misinterprets these (possible) artifacts, I, and not TiVo, may well be the culprit here.
Given that possibility, I have taken to totally zeroing out the partition map of a drive after burn-in and testing and before I prep it for TiVo. (I use ‘dd’ to write zeroes to the first 100 sectors of a drive.)
It’s been a few months since I’ve had a lost-all-recordings crash on one of my HD units. Whether this is because of my obliteration of the partition map before installation of the TiVo OS or due to updates TiVo has made to its OS, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll have such a crash tomorrow. Maybe I never will again. [update: as of August 29, 2011, there have been no more crashes that lost all the recordings on my HD TiVo DVRs.]
My older Series 2 TiVo DVRs run for months on end with no crashing and no rebooting necessary. I really like my TiVos.