tivo with receiver-less Dish Network

[chamilton4853]

Is this possible: I have Dish Network with a DVR ... the DVR has one receiver but it works with two TVs (living room and bedroom). I want to set up my Tivo DT Series II in the bedroom because I. miss my Tivo, want access to Unboxed and because we have a lifetime subscription. Can't set up Tivo in living room because that's the HD TV. Does the Tivo have to be directly connected to the Dish receiver? Is it possible to set up the Tivo in the bedroom? It won't have a receiver so how will it control the channels? Thanks!

[classicsat]

Yes, the TiVo needs located at the (a) receiver to use the A/V out and IR control of AV1. The RF only AV2 is totally unusable by TiVo. Or you can get the TiVo its own receiver.

[chamilton4853]

Thanks!

[flatcurve]

On my 522, TV2 has it's own composite outputs and I think you can switch the remote to be either IR or RF... or maybe I'm confused. But even if that wasn't an issue, it's still a logistical nightmare to use any other DVR in conjunction with a Dish DVR. They go into standby every night at 3am... and which tuner it records on is a crap shoot, depending on your timers and their priority... It just makes more sense to get a stand-alone receiver for the TiVo if you really want to use it. Your LNB should be able to support four receivers I think, depending on what kind of switch you have, and if you buy the receiver on ebay or craigslist, you don't have to lease it.

[chamilton4853]

Thanks. So to clarify, you're suggesting that I purchase a second Dish Network receiver to hook up to the bedroom TV, and set up the Tivo in the bedroom?

[flatcurve]

I just think that might be the easiest way to get Dish Network on a TiVo... I've tried setting up a non-TiVo DVR with my Dish Network DVR and it didn't work too well. Because I was using TV2, I had to set up timers on both DVRs manually. And my timers didn't always go off on TV2... if there were two timers going at once, the higher priority recording was made on TV2 and my timer would go off on TV1. You can change the settings on the receiver so that you can specify which tuner to use when recording, but it causes a lot of priority conflicts that take extra time and attention to resolve manually.

What I'm saying is that you can certainly do it with the receiver you have, but you have to sacrifice some functionality on it to do so... and it's a pretty big headache in general.

You can find Dish Network 311 receivers on ebay for $50 or less... They'd probably charge you to have someone come out and install it, but it's not hard to do yourself. I don't know if they'd charge extra for you to use it, but it would probably be less than the lease fee.