A pivotal stage reached !!!

[nialled]

Well done. I have 4 Series 1 TiVos as well as a new Virgin TiVo & what Virgin have done to 'butcher' their Tivo is a travesty.
I won't go into it here but I really hope I will be able to carry on using my old Tivos for as long as their hardware holds up. I don't know if you are planning to charge for your service but if you do, I will be quite happy to pay.
Thanks. Niall

[Pete77]

I have 4 Series 1 TiVos as well as a new Virgin TiVo & what Virgin have done to 'butcher' their Tivo is a travesty.

What are the most objectionable ways in which Virgin have "butchered" their new version of the Tivo?

[wadsworth]

I have been following this link for a while as a guest, as like everyone here I want to keep my Tivo running.
All I can say is WOW guys, what a great job you are doing. Count me in on this
Thank you all for the hard work you have put into this.....

[chrispe35]

Excellent News..Can't wait to try it..I just can't live without my TIVO!!

Getting very annoyed with the constant TVO messages telling me to switch to Virgin..when I can't..

[Voyager03]

Getting very annoyed with the constant TVO messages telling me to switch to Virgin..when I can't..

I usually get to the TiVo before my wife, but she got to see the latest adversing burp from Virgin and asked 'why do they send us that when they know we can't get it?'

Anyhow, we are desperate not to loose our TiVo so REALLY pleased to see what is happing. Thanks for all your efforts, guys. Keeping my fingers crossed.

[baward]

Absolutely marvellous work! I add my heartfelt appreciation to that of other folks on this thread.

[nialled]

To answer Pete77, here are a few things that are not as good on the Virgin TiVo:

Fast Forward slowed down (although rewind still seems to be as fast). It takes 'ages' to skip through the adverts now
Remote more complicated but less functional. Fortunately, most of the old TiVo shortcuts still work (Like TiVo 2 for the ToDo List)
User interface is cluttered & less intuitive
Overall, box is slower to respond & startup (could be the Cisco hardware I suppose)
Favourites don't work properly
TV Guide harder to understand & difficult to determine program durations & exact start/finish times
Can't jump to a specific date in TV Guide
The TV Banner at the top slows everything else down while it loads (although that may be a TiVo thing anyway) & you can't turn it off
The little TiVo 'bing' noises don't always work (minor but I have got used to them over the years)
There are also lots of little things that just aren't the same as before and in my opinion are a retorgrade step. I accept that to a new user (especially a V+ User which was even worse), they probably won't be so much of a problem.
Searching for TV programs is frustrating as they insist on cluttering it up with a search results for Actors names as well. Maybe it is possible to turn this off but I haven't found it yet.
I haven't tried it yet, but I'm pretty sure the Virgin TiVo won't boot without a connection to Virgin. This may not sound like a big problem but the Virgin cable connection to our area went down on Christmas Day & Boxing Day in 2010. Had we been dependent on Virgin, not only could we not have watched any TV but we couldn't have watched any recorded progams either!

I could go on but hopefully you get the general idea. On the plus side, it has 2 tuners (now 3 I think), I can program it remotely from the web & it does record HD but I can do that with Sky + HD & get more HD channels.

I think anyone who has used a Series 1 & then moves to a Virgin TiVo will be disappointed with everything apart from the HD & extra Tuner(s)

[Pete77]

nialled,

Thanks for that very useful run down on the new Virgin Tivo and the many ways in which Virgin have clearly had it changed to have it operate like a more normal cable or satellite tv company box so that it is much more difficult to skip the adverts fully and you are also forced to pay attention to channels to which you either do not currently subscribe and/or also never watch. To hear that it generally runs slower than the old 1998 design Tivo box despite a massively faster processor and huge amounts more memory sounds quite extraordinary. The Pentium Corei3 350M Samsung laptop with 4GB of memory and Windows 7 64 bit I just set up for my mother to replace her eight year old 1.3ghz Pentium 4 Mobile Samsung with only 512MB of memory (it originally came with only 256MB but was upgraded several years ago) definitely runs much, much faster than the old machine so why would the same not be true of a Tivo with a 10 years younger design?

Anyhow since I'm not in Virgin Cable land I will not feel so bad about continuing to run my old Tivo with the hopefully successful new non Tivo/Tribune EPG after June 1st.

[nialled]

Pete77
I don't know why it is slower, but it is. I would guess it is either down to sloppy programming or maybe it is just doing a lot more in the background (possibly a bit of both). I suspect that if you could somehow put the Series 1 TiVo OS onto the Virgin hardware it would absolutely 'fly'. Just because the software is newer, doesn't mean it is faster; just look at the way that each version of Microsoft Office is slower than its predecessor or compare Windows XP with Windows Vista (clumsy comparisons I know, but they give the general idea). I'm sure someone can think of better examples where this kind of thing has happened (Mobile phones maybe?).

Here is an example of how the S1 & Virgin Tivos compare. While watching live TV, if you press the TiVo button (now called the 'Home' button by Virgin). On the S1 TiVo, the menu screen comes up virtually instantly (certainly less than 0.5 sec). On the Virgin box it takes about 3 sec. Press 2 from here to get the ToDo list & the S1 is about 1 sec compared to around 3sec for Virgin. Getting from the 'Home' screen to actually playing back a recording, the difference is even more noticable.

It's not that it is un-usably slow, it just feels unresponsive compared to the old S1. I think my point is that unless you really want HD or the additional tuner(s) (or I suppose an HDMI port), you are not missing out on anything by not being able to get the Virgin TiVo (so long as the guys here can get the new guide data up & running).
In case you are interested, the S1 has been upgraded to a 500GB HDD & cachecard with 512MB RAM but all 4 of the S1 machines respond about the same (even though 2 of them don't have cachecards yet).

[geekev]

It was a close call but I am back from the edge of darkness. If the chap in Comet this afternoon had been a little bit more helpful I might have purchased the pricey Humax HDR-FOX T2. I would like HDMI, and dual tuners, but as HD is not actually scheduled for my area (Brighton) until next year, £299.99 seems a lot to pay.

I found this forum just in time, great effort and more power to your elbows !! I will be following with great interest.

Thanks, Kevin.

[healeydave]

I don't know why it is slower, but it is.

Whilst these boxes have dedicated decoders for handling the physical TV streams, they have pretty mediocre hardware on the "computer" side of things. Look at the S1's technical specs, the PowerPC and RAM is a pittance, but with its basic GUI and MPEG decoder, it handles everything fine.
Unfortunately later TiVo boxes suffer the same design principles of under powered computing yet have a lot more demanding GUI's. Whilst the rest of the world is waking up to how bad FLASH really is (thanks to Apple), the problem with TiVo is they are behind the times, I believe they rely heavily on FLASH and should probably be adopting HTML5.

[UKSTEVE]

Just a belated note to say thanks to you guys for keeping our Tivos going after the switch-off.

Nice One! Steve

[burt649]

I love you techno wizards, you amaze me, thanks for doing this, the thought of no Tivo, in a few weeks time, fills me with sadness.
I just hope you're not going ask me to do something technical for the change over.
thanks once again.
Corey

[Arinda]

Thankyou so much for what you are doing - you deserve a medal!

[mrtickle]

Thank-you from me too. This is great stuff.

I've been very busy and haven't posted to the main tivo forum for a while (the way its cookies work meaning it's now a requirement to read everything in one sitting or lose your read/unread thread settings). Obviously I read the announcement when it happened. I don't have a spare tivo so couldn't have really helped test anyway, but what I can bring is ongoing guide data corrections as I have a good eye for detail (eg the 'search by title' screenshot on the previous page is missing the background grey from the Ouija board and the back text entry bar, and I can remember why too!).