good tivo progress

I’ve made some good progress in getting the Tivo machine to work. Once again the gory details are in the extended entry to spare the people who expect pictures of cats.

The machine is currently as functional as possible (TM) given that I am still working with the bones of my old system. The RAM is still not here for the new system, but once that arrives it should be a fairly easy process of moving the components over, reconfiguring for the new sound card, and making sure it’s all right.

I recorded some shows last night as a test, namely The Egg on PBS. it worked. I had to do some tweaking to the clock to make sure that it started at the beginning and ended at the end, but that seems all set. The current machine is just not fast enough for the highest quality mpeg4 video, so I’m looking forward to seeing what the new machine can do. Please god let it not be a bad mobo after all this time.

I spent a lot of the day getting the fucking remote control to work properly. It’s a bitch to get right, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong. I might even have to change the setup again since the button for “exit” on my software is the same IR code as the button for “exit” on the cable box. This doesn’t seem to cause too many problems tho. There are some weird times when the channel doesn’t change, or it ends up at the stupid guide instead of the actual channel. These are bugs to be worked on.

My biggest fear seems to have evaporated. The IR doohickey sends and receives. It must send to the cable box, but it must receive from my remote control. This would seem to mean it needs to point in two directions (toward the user, and toward the cable box). I thought I would need to do some crap with angling the cable box, but no! It turns out that glass reflects IR signals. So I just aim the doohickey outward, close the doors of my tv stand, and voila, it can still talk to the cable box. I haven’t had a failed channel change yet (yet). Anyway this is probably the first happy accident so far.