As you may have surmised from my CableCARD misadventures, I’ve decided to go ahead and purchase a TiVo Premiere.
However, I am well aware of the reported performance and stability issues related to the new HD UI. The most common and disruptive behavior appears to be DVR lockups, requiring a hard reboot (aka pulling the plug). While many have chosen to work around this by running the original SD interface full time, for now we’re keeping the Premiere, with its incomplete and sluggish HDUI, on our secondary TV — where we rarely watch recorded programming or much of anything else that requires flipping through the menus. However, the days of caution may be behind us.
Earlier this week, TiVo’s Twitter account reported there would be two software updates hitting in the near future. The first landing at the end of this month, the second poised for a May delivery. As it turns out, the plan has changed. And last night 14.1c started rolling according to employee Margret Schmidt and forum reports. Perhaps addressing that most pressing lockup issue. Or, maybe not.
And just because your a great source of Tivo News, I want to add a little information regarding the RCN Tivo integration.
Screenshots can be seen over at the RCN DSLReports thread (permalink: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r24110123- )
RCN will lease real Tivo Premiers to subscribers. However the software stack is customized for RCN by Tivo. Not only does it contain the necessary application to access their Seachange VOD system, but at this point there is no way to switch to the HDUI. Straight from rcnman’s Jason Nealis
quote:
We are launching on the classic UI, this was done for a couple of reasons, Time to market and stability. The new HDUI is wonderful but we based all development to start early against the classic UI. The goal is to roll out the HDUI by end of Q3 across all markets.
Classic / HD etc.. It’s a much improved interface for those use to the legacy interfaces.
Good info, thanks! Maybe I’ll hit it in a separate post this weekend.
But I wonder if it reinforces the theory that retail TiVo Premiere owners are beta testing the new HDUI? When Microsoft blew up the 360 UI, I don’t recall ever having to pull the plug or find a way to run the old interface. Same with AppleTV.
I also want to add, the subscriber must also have RCN’s cable modem service.
Bringing your own access ie) Verizon DSL, will not work if you want to pull VOD into the RCN Tivo. The gateway server that pulls the IP requests from the Tivo must come from your RCN cable modem.
I suspect that the RCN server may look at the mac address the request is coming from, so it knows exactly which node to setup the VOD QAM session up on. Either that, or the RCN VOD Gateway server is accessible from ONLY the RCN network (which makes sense).
There are also a few comments from RCN Tivo beta testers over at this thread:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r24099287-CATV-beta-testing
DSLReports (or Broadbandreports… whatever you want to call it), has great support from RCN on those forums. They are able to bring a lot of technical discussion down to the customer level. Comcast is starting to branch out as well. A year ago, it would of taken moving mountans to get a QAM frequency for an OTA HD channel moved so that people with basic service traps could view it. However, with corporate’s attention we were able to get the frequency moved outside of the trap’s blocking range. After all, it was a ‘basic’ OTA HD.
i woke up and saw dave’s tweet about this, went to check my tivo and when i went to the menu it froze. After rebooting i am seeing 14.1c installed, but i’m not sure if it was queued to be installed last night upon on a reboot or not…
Me too. Just got home from morning SBUX blogging and errands, went to the menu to poke around and locked up. Rebooting now, we’ll see what version I have when it’s back up. (I confirmed 14.1a before everything went went black.)
Update: Nope, still on a. Forcing a connect now.
After update TiVo performs much faster
i agree, menus seem faster. it appears as though the discovery bar is delayed now, maybe on purpose?
Is there a reason that you did not go with a Moxi instead? All round much better box, IMO.
Two things…
First, I got the update. No lockups to report at this time. And, believe me, I tried to trick it into getting locked up with dozens of button presses in rapid succession. So that’s good news.
Second, for ZNY, I still have a loaner Moxi HD DVR and Mate here. I plan to do a write up in the near future comparing Moxi to the Premiere. Moxi’s multi-room solution is very compelling. For the time being, please consider my Premiere purchase a blogging investment rather than an endorsement.
“For the time being, please consider my Premiere purchase a blogging investment rather than an endorsement.”
Wish I could claim a tax exemption for my Tivo Premiere purchase. ;)