A/V Breakout Cable

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Get a new TV. You're dropping $250 on a TiVo Mini, and hooking it up to something that was obsolete 5 years ago so you can get a blurry picture from your HD equipment? Do it right.

 

To whom are you replying? Write a letter to Tivo and tell them to remove the outputs you find personally abhorrent. Do it right.

 

That's what happened with me. I tried a 3.5mm to a two audio out cable (red and white) and there was a horrible buzzing. Tried it on my second Mini, same problem. I then used a breakout cable with red, white, and yellow outputs and got the same buzzing on both Minis when I used the red and white plugs (no yellow). I swapped the yellow for the white, and the sound was normal on both Minis. I think TiVo messed up the 3.5mm jack. Anyway, swapping the jacks worked for me.

 

Swapping didn't stop the buzzing for me, but the GLI did. I'm on the red/white plugs with good stereo. So if they messed up the jack, it's only in some Minis apparently. Two solutions for people to try! yay

 

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To the OP. It's not a bad idea to have them on there for testing/ temporary setups, connecting to a Slingbox or whatever, but in this day and age, when you can get an HDTV for so cheap, it's pretty stupid to put a $250 box on an old standard def set.

 

And that's still less than the cost of the Mini. There's just no reason to have SD sets around anymore.

 

I've been all-LCD and all-HD for several years now.

 

I get what you are saying, but there are some edge cases where I think it makes sense. In my bedroom, for example, we have an old piece of furniture that fits the SD set, but might be tricky to fit an HD set in, much less a decent-sized one. At the same time, having seen how the Minis work, I am tempted to get a second one (especially if I can get as good of a deal on it as I did on the first). At the end of the day, the set gets very little use, and will be more likely to be used to schedule the random recording when we've retired for the evening, rather than actual viewing.

 

Ugh. I have seen this example too many times. People (my parents included) bought these giant cabinets for TVs that now make no sense in the modern context of HDTVs. My parents have one that they are holding on to, because they paid some absurd amount of money to buy it to hide a big old CRT, and now it has the downstairs TV limited to 37". I've tried to convince them to move it upstairs and use it for storage, and get something more appropriate downstairs. One of their friends limited himself to a 47" TV in their main viewing area, which is very spacious, because of an old cabinet, which sucks, because the room could easily use a 70-80" TV.

That being said, if you really deem that the furniture is more important than the TV, there are HDTVs that will fit literally any space.

If all you need is scheduling, just use the smartphone or iPad apps.

 

It seems like you are quite concerned with being right about this, rather than accepting different strokes for different folks.

 

I called tivo today after getting a mini two weeks ago. Said I wasn't told when ordering that I needed to buy another cable to do component. She immediately sent me the av cable for free! My bedroom tv has only one HDmi port, and I have a roku 3 on that for prime and hbo go

 

I know I'm right about it.

It's called an HDMI switch. They have ones that are auto-switching and don't require external power for 2-3 sources.

http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=101&cp_id=10110&cs_id=1011001&p_id=8147&seq=1&format=2

 

Just keep telling yourself that.

I have a Monoprice HDMI switch in my setup, and while it helps me solve some problems, it is not perfect, especially for someone not very technically inclined. This one replaced another model, which was just completely unusable.

 

We have a old 5" LCD TV on the shelf in front of our treadmill- I have the A/V Breakout cable (with 20' extension) from the TiVo connected to it's A/V in connector.
On that 5" screen while walking on the treadmill- there would be no difference between sd screen resolution and a hd screen. It also lets me use an existing piece of hardware I already own with no additional cost- so that's useful too.

 

You could get an LCD HDTV to watch instead that would support the full resolution of the TiVo Mini. And a 5" screen for video? That's awful. That's worse than an iPad!

 

Drat! I wish I had bothered to look at the audio-out on the mini, or had seen this thread! I recently installed a Roamio and 3 minis. All use HDMI, except the home theater. The signal breaks out to an HDMI distributor and one of the feeds is an LED TV that does not understand Dolby Surround signals. No problem, I have a dedicated stereo feed to that TV. I had not gotten around to plugging in the mini stereo to RCA dongle until just now, hours before the Super Bowl. But it's not an audio-out port, it's a proprietary composite with stereo port!!!!!

Since I have no time to procure the proprietary Tivo AV dongle, I set the mini to PCM stereo out (I'll have to give up the surround sound, but at least the home theater and bar systems will all have the same synchronized audio).

Note to Tivo: Would it REALLY have been so hard to have a dedicated stereo-audio output on the mini?!?!? And if you insist on using your own proprietary port, how about including the required dongle to use it?!?!?!

-MC

 

No one cares, because everyone just uses HDMI.

 

I care, and don't use HDMI for one of my TVs. Please don't speak for me.