TiVo Woes

After a short 2 days of vacation over Memorial Day, my family arrived home and eventually noticed that there was something significantly wrong with the family TiVo. What we noticed was a completely black screen and any option we chose via the remote would result in the TiVo error "bonk".

I could see the device was working via my iPad connection to it, recording shows on schedule and serving up the guide with correct show times. I just couldn't find a way to get it out of this broken state. Even a cold reboot would only work as long as I didn't try to hit the "TiVo button" which launches into their custom user interface.

As a brief history, I own a TiVo Premiere (and have had it for 17 months) and owned two TiVos prior to this one, dating back as far as 2002. In all that time, I've not had any significant issues and have been a very happy customer.

On a whim, I decided to do a few Google searches to see if this was a common occurrence. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the symptoms, it is a difficult problem to put into searchable terms given 10 years of DVR history on the web. With a little persistence, I found a few answers between TiVo Community and tivo.com.

As it turns out, the latest update to software version 14.8 has been causing multiple issues for many people. The last thing I wanted to do was deal with customer service on the phone; I hate phones and help lines especially. I saw one of the options on the TiVo site was a customer service chat and I've always found customer service representatives that work chat services to be more helpful than phone representatives, so I gave it a shot.

I was first in line and had a rep within one minute; I quickly explained my issue and after verifying me as a currently subscribed customer, he gave me a tip:

From the TiVo Central screen (default destination from a single TiVo button press), do the button combination of:

thumbs down, thumbs up, play, play

Doing this combination restarts the user interface process from scratch. This worked perfectly and I was back up and running. If I run into any other issues in the near future, this is a good go-to combination to resolve it temporarily.

No estimates on a permanent fix to this revision of the software but I wouldn't expect it to take too long... I can't imagine what less technical users do if they were to hit this situation but I doubt most average TV watchers would know how to research or resolve this.

I love my TiVo despite watching very little TV over the last year (I watch less than one show a week on average). The rest of my family enjoys TV from time-to-time and it is still awesome to be at broadcast TV's beck and call. I just hope that TiVo (the company) improves their software which has been suffering for many years to neglect and lack of innovation. This is incredibly unfortunate for such a revolutionary device!