Registered: Mar 2001
Location: Mountain View, CA, USA
Posts: 1371

What kind of reliability are others seeing with the HD Tivo? I am visiting my parents, who have an HD Tivo, and the unit has frozen a couple times since I've been here. They say that it has happened fairly often recently.

Most often it happens some time when in standby mode, and when they turn the TV on to view it, they only have a black screen.

Today, I was watching something, and changed the channel. The unit stopped responding to input, but the video/audio was still showing - with the channel info banner staying on the screen. It didn't respond to remote input or pressing the buttons on the front of the STB.

In all cases, the solution is to unplug the Tivo to reset it.


Otherwise, it works great.. but it hangs often enough to get annoying.

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Registered: May 2000
Location: Missouri
Posts: 3110

In my case the black screen when I sit down to use my TiVo has always been because the TiVo has been no one of the channels for downloading promos or service data. My HR10-250 has been outstanding since I have got it in August and my standard definition TiVos have been excellent since I got my first one in October 2000. The software is very stable, the hard drives can fail and in the case of the HD TiVo, the HDMI port fails way too often.

Chris

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Registered: Mar 2001
Location: Mountain View, CA, USA
Posts: 1371

Yeah, the empty channel thing confused them at first. But, I told them to hit Info, or the Tivo button to make sure it was working. I have seen the lockup a few times myself, and I can confirm that the box would not respond to any events. Even the LED that changes color when it receives a IR command was not responding.

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Registered: Mar 2004
Location: Small Town X, HDTV Land
Posts: 1565

If the unit is locking up, then you should have it replaced. DirecTV wants happy customers, unlike some of its rivals, and has no problems replacing defective units. On a non-defective unit (which most are) the HD DirecTivo is the best it gets. Simply said, its the best HD DVR on the U.S market. It out preforms every other HD DVR from all other service providers, maybe the guide isn't the fastest, but other then that it is great and extreamly stable. You can't top its reliabilty and features. The next version of the software it runs on should fix the slow guide (as seen on the new R10).

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