Help, DirecTivo died, need replacement or fix [Text View]

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greenstork

04-05-2006, 03:15 PM

I've been a DTV customer for the past 10 years and a Tivo subscriber for the past 3 years. About two years ago, I bought a most awesome Samsung DirecTivo unit with dual tuners and a nice size HD. I've been in Tivo heaven since my purchase but my unit just died yesterday. It stopped recording things, told me I had to activate my DVR service with DTV. I called DTV, went through a troubleshooting sequence which required me to unplug the Tivo unit for a minute and power up again. Well, now it starts to power up, tells me I'm almost there, then cycles over and starts the reboot sequence over and over again, never getting fully operational. Samsung says "out of warranty sorry bud but you can send it to us to fix for at least $200" and my guess is that DTV will say "how about a discount on our DTV DVR unit." That's not going to work.

Bottom line, I need to fix my machine myself with some heavy tinkering or buy a new Tivo. Here are my necessities in order of importance, I need some future proof advice:

1) I need Tivo not some cable company or DTV faker unit, no ifs, ands or buts about it, I'm addicted.

2) I need dual tuners, I just can't do without it now that I have experienced it.

3) I would prefer an all-in-one set-top box + Tivo solution because I believe the quality of the picture is better. I had the Pioneer 810H standalone Tivo/DVD recorder and the picture quality was horrendous, even watching live TV, and the channel changing & guide were terribly slow. I would prefer not to go down that road again but recognize that this may be my only choice.

4) I'll probably buy an HD-TV in the next two years but it isn't necessary to have a HD Tivo unit at this time since I'll probably be getting a Series 3 Tivo. It's much more important to me to meet requirements 1 through 3 listed above before considering an HD TV option.

I'm perfectly willing to switch over to Comcast if it means that I can meet the above listed requirements. I have no ties to DTV or Comcast, but really only to Tivo and dual tuners.

I need advice, what is my best option, all things considered? I have no idea where to start looking for a new unit. I would like to just get a Series 3 and put some dual cable cards in it, but alas, I'm going to have to wait until it is released. I was hoping that my 1 1/2 year old Samsung unit would have been able to hold out until Series 3, damn these disposable electronics.

As an aside, if there is anyone out there who has encountered my somewhat unique Samsung failure and has any advice for how I might fix it, that is certainly the ideal scenario.

Thanks in advance.

-Dave

fsck_101

04-05-2006, 04:13 PM

It sounds like a hard drive gone bad. Weaknees sells replacement hard drive kits, or you can send the unit to them to replace the hard drive, depending on your technical aptitude. The kit comes with a torx screwdriver to open the box, then it's just a matter of removing the existing drive and dropping in the new one...

JFriday

04-05-2006, 04:24 PM

Call DTV back, one of mine went out a couple weeks ago and I called to see if they could replace it. It cost me 16.00 for shipping and another 2 year commitment. My DTivo was out of warranty too.

greenstork

04-05-2006, 04:40 PM

Call DTV back, one of mine went out a couple weeks ago and I called to see if they could replace it. It cost me 16.00 for shipping and another 2 year commitment. My DTivo was out of warranty too.

Was it also a Samsung unit like this one?

BillyBob_jcv

04-05-2006, 04:58 PM

If you aren't squimish about opening the unit, replacing the hard drive and doing the Linux drive shuffle in your PC - you could just buy a new IDE drive and download a Samsung image from PTVUpgrade for $20 and build it yourself. Assuming you get a deal on a ~200GB drive for ~$70, that would total to less than $100 and a couple of hours of your time.

...or you could just buy a whole new/used dtivo off ebay and have D* remarry it to your access card.

greenstork

04-05-2006, 05:02 PM

Thanks for the advice all. I ended up calling WeaKnees and purchasing a replacement drive kit for under $200. I have a Mac and not a PC so it would have been a challenge for me to manage imaging the drive myself (I'm not sure I can boot up a Linux liveCD).

At least now I can wait a year or two to upgrade to HD, Series 3 Tivo, and cable TV all at once and save myself the expense of a stopgap measure.

cowboys2002

04-05-2006, 05:52 PM

Hash

04-06-2006, 11:26 PM

Thanks for the advice all. I ended up calling WeaKnees and purchasing a replacement drive kit for under $200.

Too bad I didn't join up sooner... I would've told you to buy R10 off eBay for $50-75. Would've met all of your criteria, and been made by RCA/Hughes, not Samsung.

That aside, I really wanted to comment on your future plans.

There is a big video quality difference between an all-in-one DirecTiVo, and two seperate units. The DirecTiVo handles MPEG2 natively. The Satellite broadcasts MPEG2, and the TiVo records it. There is no re-encoding. I have done PC based encoding for over 5 years - and I don't care how good the PC (or MAC), how good (fancy, expensive, or otherwise) the software, and how big the file (RAW video is about 64GB/hour of video @ 720x480), you will ALWAYS lose quality when you encode. This is also just as true of a hardware encoder. (I use software based encoders so I can manipulate the GOP structure manually...)

Now - when you get your Series 3 TiVo - it WILL NOT be a DirecTivo. Dave's cutting TiVo out... at least so far. We can hope he comes to his senses, as the R15 really appears to be a flop, even though DirecTV continues to force it down the customer's gullet.

So - with 2 boxes, you're back to the same crappy quality produced by encoding not once, but TWICE.

That then leaves Comcast. Problem is (at least around my parts) they broadcast crappy looking video to start with and precious little DD sound.

I've been a DirecTV subscriber since '94. But, I have Comcast Internet. The ladies down at the cable office can never understand why I don't have Cable TV on my bill...

Alway fun. :D

So any way that I can seem to slice your situation, a Series 3 will be a downgrade for you.

transpizzle

04-16-2006, 04:08 PM