TIVO upgrade

Anyone here ever upgraded a TIVO? I know it can be done by adding a hard drive but there has to be more to it than buying a drive and hooking it up.

 

No but if you modem dies let me know I can get it fixed real cheap.
Have you scouted this http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/

 

yeah, i've upgraded mine.

what kind of tivo you got? directivo or stand-alone?

adding a drive is more than just buying a drive. i got a kit from this place: http://www.weaknees.com/

it comes with some cables, an additional fan, a drive, and a drive bracket. there's really not any space in the tivo for a 2nd drive (at least, not in mine) so the drive bracket adds a space for the new drive. also, the drive is formated and ready to go. if you had to format it yourself, you'd need to slap it in a pc and run some exotic linux tools to "bless" the drive so that when inserted into the tivo, the tivo will create new space on it. anyway, it's worth getting the kit to do it. they have good instructions and everything.

if you wanted to just buy a drive and replace your current drive, you could do that without the kit, but you'd need to do some stuff with a linux box and those exotic tools. also, tivo doesn't do drives bigger than 137gb without a modified operating system, so don't bother getting anything too big.

lemme know if you've got any other questions. i just did a bunch of stuff and had to wade thru tons for stuff to figure out what applied to me.

 

http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com/index.php

i upgraded an 80 GB standalone series 2 to 250 GB a few nights ago. I used the weaknees instructions (link above), but had a couple of issues with their linux boot cd. Used the PTVupgrade.com free boot cd instead, but followed the weaknees instructions. Took about 4 hours including 2.5 hours to image the old drive. (series 2 with os 7.2 supports drives greater than 137 GB)

Much easier than I thought it would be. The hardest part was pulling the drives, and that wasn't really hard, just a pain in the ass.

Now have:
273 hours basic
164 medium
125 high
78 best

 

did you just replace your drive or did you add a new one? 250gb only gives you 78 hours at best quality? i have a directivo that i upgraded to two 160 gb drives. it took me a while to debug some issues, but finally got it going. i have probably 300gb allocated to media, which gives me about 290 hours of record time. directivo records the directv signal directly since it's already mpeg2. i thought that stand alone tivo's best quality record time was comperable to the directivo record time, but i guess not....

 

The 80GB drive only gave 24 hours at best quality before the upgrade. (although the digital channels appear to use about one-third LESS space than analog channels)

edit: i use medium on everything but sports and stuff I plan to burn

 

DirecTV already compresses the channels, plus the 290 hours you're stating is the maximum (similar to using standard TiVo's basic) you'll get...

It's rather meaningless, as my HDTiVo (natively has a 250GB drive) records everything I could ever want and more, along with random TiVo picks to fill the space...and that's with the huge HD recordings mixed in.

 

you can get a new bow from DirecTV for free and a second for $99 and it's 100 hours

 

yeah, i know directv's signal is compressed. i had just assumed that tivo's best compression was the same compression ratio. i was surprised to see that it more closely approximates the lowest quality compression (which i've seen and is not at all watchable in my opinion).

i was surprised to learn otherwise.

i'm a packrat, so i like keeping things around forever. i think i've finally filled the thing (suggestions finally reached 0). there's probably some utility i could use to figure out just how much video is recorded on the thing to test out the 290 hour number.

 

you didn't learn otherwise, you just learned that the info screen that says your DirecTiVo gets 290 hours is very optimistic (assuming very good compression ratios achieved).