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Menu navigation on our Series 2 Tivo has been agonizingly slow for the last 3-6 months. My expectations are based on the actual performance of the Tivo for the first 2.5 years. But menu navigation has dragged since Tivo introduced - wait, imposed - advertising throughout the menus and in the deletion confirmation menu shown at the end of each recorded program. Each click on a menu item results in a 30-60 second wait for the next screen to be displayed. I think that navigating the Web on a 14.4 kbps modem would provide a better user experience than what our Tivo offers.

So, tonight I got around to calling Tivo Support to get some answers. First, our Tivo is connected to our home network using a wired Ethernet adapter so there's no chance of signal interference being an issue. Second, I've gone through the steps of forcing Tivo to reconnect to the service looking for an update, and have performed a power-cycle of the Tivo to make sure that memory leaks aren't at fault. Unfortunately, none of these helped. The support person who handled my call looked at all of these facts and said that the only thing I could do was "exchange" our Tivo appliance for another Series 2 model at a cost of $149. We purchased our Tivo for $50. How can Tivo justify the price of $149? I declined the exchange and informed the support person that they had been no help whatsoever, and that paying Tivo over $150 per year for simple television guide data is ridiculous.

I now have additional motivation to get MythTV or another open-source PVR system working. Tivo's business practices impose replacement of perfectly good hardware on their customers. I am nearly certain that the lag in our Tivo has been caused by recent system software upgrades forced by the Tivo company. Tivo has lost my support, and will soon lose me as a customer.

Posted by Scott at 7:34 PM | Permalink

Last year when Natalie & I bought our Tivo DVR, we didn't have a phone line to our apartment and figured that we'd use our cable Internet connection to download new program listings and such. The Tivo Series 2 devices don't have a network adapter built-in, but they do have two USB 2.0 ports that can be used to connect supported wired- and wireless-network adapters. We had bought a really nice D-Link wireless adapter that was officially supported by Tivo, could use WPA and WEP wireless encryption, and could connect to 802.11B and 802.11G networks.

The adapter worked great, except that the Tivo Series 2 devices had no support for WPA, which was the wireless encryption method we had been using at the time. So, we downgraded our encryption to WEP until purchasing a wired Netgear USB Ethernet adapter that has worked equally well and permits us to use WPA on our wireless network.

Over the last 3-4 months, our Tivo has been responding...very...slowly...to menu selections. I had been hoping that Tivo would soon come out with a system software upgrade that would improve the performance. So, I was really surprised to find out that the upgrade they sent last week (8.1-01-2-540) included not only performance enhancements, but also support for WPA encryption on wireless networks! We haven't been able to test it out since we're perfectly happy with our current wired-Ethernet adapter, but we might revert to the old D-Link wireless adapter if we get another Tivo and move our current unit to a different part of the apartment.

I think this is really great news for Tivo-owners who don't want to downgrade the security of their wireless networks just for the sake of a home appliance. WPA is more computationally expensive than WEP, so the processing power needs to be available on the hardware in order for WPA to be a drop-in solution.

Posted by Scott at 7:23 AM | Permalink

The D-Link 802.11 b/g wireless network adapter we've been using with our Tivo for the last 6 months has worked flawlessly. The only downside has been Tivo's lack of support for Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) authentication. Tivo only supports Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), which is vulnerable to attacks using widely-available hacking tools. The lack of WPA support has forced us to downgrade the security of our entire network.

A few days ago I received the new Netgear FA120 USB Ethernet adapter. I plugged it into the Tivo's USB port and was immediately connected to the LAN and Internet. Problem solved.

Next, I upgraded the wireless security on the Linksys WRT54GS access point to use WPA2 authentication. WPA2 uses military-grade 128-bit AES encryption, and an ever-changing key to eliminate the threat of record-playback attacks. Take that, evil hax0rs and governments snoops!

Posted by Scott at 10:24 AM | Permalink

I recently learned how to access Tivo recordings via a web browser. This makes up for the lack of the Tivo Desktop software program for Mac OS X. The steps are pretty straightforward:

1. Determine the IP address of the Tivo DVR, or the Zero Configuration (Bonjour) networking name of the DVR (mine was dvr-dc88.local).
2. Open a web browser with the URL https://[IP address]/, or https://[bonjour name]/. The URL I used was https://dvr-dc88.local/
3. When prompted for a username and password, use 'tivo' as the username and your Media Access Key (obtained from Tivo's account management website) as the password.
4. Download any video content offered via the web interface.
5. Use MplayerOSX to play any of the Tivo videos.

Here's what the browser-based interface looks like:

Posted by Scott at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We've been using a D-Link 802.11G wireless network adapter with our Series 2 Tivo for the last 6 months with little difficulty. However, Tivo doesn't seem to understand that the Wired Equivalence Privacy (WEP) has a weak authentication mechanism and has long been replaced by the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) standard. We'd like to use WPA, but are stuck using WEP until Tivo makes the move.

Yesterday, I became fed up with the wireless support in Tivo and purchased a USB Ethernet adapter to provide the Tivo with a wired connection to our broadband router. This will provide the Tivo with a secure wired connection, and allow us to upgrade the security on the wireless network to use WPA 2. The network adapter I ordered is the Netgear FA120. It has received good reviews on Amazon and was reasonably priced ($25).

The other solution I was considering was to buy another wireless router that could be configured to use a low grade of security (WEP), and use our existing wireless router to provide a high grade of security (WPA) while connected to a switch port on the low-security router. This was too complex and expensive to implement. It would have meant spending at least $40 on the access point. Also, an additional access point represents one more system to secure and configure. Purchasing a wired Ethernet adapter was a much simpler and secure solution.

Posted by Scott at 8:20 AM | Permalink

Natalie and I have had been enjoying our Tivo system for last 6 months. However, one of the original setup hurdles was dealing with the telephone-based setup process when we didn't have a telephone line to our apartment. Fortunately, upon completing the setup we were able to request an early-access release of the Tivo software that downloads television programming information and system updates from the Internet using a connected network adapter.

We'll be moving from Monterey to the San Francisco Bay Area soon, and will need to repeat the Tivo setup process to obtain TV programming info appropriate for our area. Fortunately, the Tivo software allows the repeated setup to be conducted over Internet connections in addition to the telephone lines. We're considering getting Vonage or another Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) telephone service provider so that we can continue to be free of Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS). Woohoo!

Posted by Scott at 12:09 PM | Permalink

Natalie & I bought a Tivo last weekend, having grown tired of hearing people rave about how Tivo has changed their life. Well, it's pretty damn cool. One of the major hurdles during setup was our lack of a phone line, which is required for performing the initial Guided Setup and subsequent television programming updates if you lack a broadband connection.

What? Broadband? Tivo? Being a geek and technology junkie, I had to at least try connecting the Tivo to our wireless LAN. I bought the D-Link DWL-G122 USB wireless adapter, which connects to the Tivo through the built-in USB 2.0 hub. I also had to download (~50 minutes over the phone line) the Tivo 7.1b early-access system software in order to use the wireless adapter. That aside, it was a painless process.

My only complaint is that the Tivo software does not support WPA encryption for the wireless connection. I modified our access point to use WEP 128-bit encryption instead, which was a major concession since WEP is significantly less secure than WPA.

So, now I can "push" recording requests to our Tivo through the Tivo website and download television programming updates rapidly over the broadband connection. No phone required. I'm loving it!

Posted by Scott at 2:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)