NZTivo, New Zealand specific Tivo information.
NZTivo FAQ – In Progress
This page is definitely not an end point for anyone interested in Tivo. Most of this information in one way or another has originated from the OzTivo site. It is presented here to give you some quick answers to various Tivo questions you might have and questions relating to getting Tivo working in NZ.
The definitive FAQ and How To documents on operating Tivo outside of the US can be found at:
http://oztivo.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome
This is the Oztivo website and will answer most if not all of your questions, there is a lot of info there, although their site is geared towards guided setups for Australian users and such, it is the motherload for Tivo information. They have a very active mailing list that I recommend you subscribe to. It’s quite an active list. (might like to create a seperate folder in your email client). If you really want to dig in to Tivo information download their email archive as it’s a goldmine of information. There is also a search engine for their mailing list here.
What kind of Tivo do I need?
You’ll want a US or UK Tivo Series1. Model HDR112, HDR212, HDR312.
The model number denotes the Hard Disk size. 112=10GB, 212=20GB, etc.
PAL
Both the US & UK Tivo’s have video & TV tuner support. The US Tivo Series1 has an NTSC TV tuner, and the UK PAL. If you want to watch “free to air” (ie broadcast) TV you will want a UK one. Or you can do the PAL mod, which requires getting ahold of a suitable replacement tuner and soldering it in place, not for the faint hearted. Whilst it might seem favourable to get a UK Tivo as it is more useful in New Zealand it is however unecessary, but by all means try to get one if you can 
The UK Tivo’s are alot more expensive tho because they are still current (Tivo have sold Series1 in the US since 1999?) and buying in Pounds is expensive! Without a tuner all of your recording will be with the video input. No sweat… that means you will need to use either a VCR, or a STB (Set-Top-Box, eg Cable/Satellite decoder). One caveat here is that with the US Tivo you will get a black bar at the bottom of the screen when you are in the Tivo menu’s (the PAL format has more lines than NTSC).
Power Supply
The Tivo has an auto-switching power supply unit (PSU) so it can work with our 220v power supply but you will need to buy a VCR cable with a two/three pin plug. They cost less than $10.
Recommendations: The easiest way to get a Tivo is to purchase a US Series1 without Hard Drive (refurbished) Tivo from either:
- http://www.eksys.com for $90US and $85US Priority International to NZ (United States Postal Service)- Includes all necessary cables, remotes and HDD mouting brackets. Turbonet ($70US) and Serial($10US) cables also availble. See next FAQ
- http://www.poweron.com for $80US and pay $70US for postage to New Zealand. (Prices may not be current).
Buy a VCR cable locally.
What additional hardware do I need?
You’ll need a network card (or serial cable) and Hard Drive(s).
Network or Serial
In order to setup a Tivo you will need to use either a Tivo ethernet card, Tivo wireless card, or a Tivo serial cable. The best way to use Tivo is to network it to your modem/router or PC using the Turbonet ™ (100mbit Tivo network card) or the Airnet ™ (802.11b Tivo wireless adaptor, requires Prism 2/2.4 Chipset PCMCIA card plus antenna). A cheaper alternative is to use a serial cable.
For day to day running of Tivo haivng a networked Tivo is beneficial, eg for extracting video, using tivoweb (Tivo webserver, i.e. control your Tivo from the Internet), downloading guide data, etc. However, once you are setup all you really need to do is download new guide data (which is done automatically or manual if need be), this can be achieved using the serial cable, built-in modem (some restrictions on which ISP’s work tho), or the networking options as mentioned above.
The serial cable you need is documented on OzTivo here Suitable Tivo serial cable but we strongly suggest using one of the network cards.
Just briefly about the two networking options available for the Tivo. The Turbonet (100 baseT network card) and Airnet (802.11b wireless adapter card). Both are trademarked and sold by 9thTee, an online store based in the US. I don’t know any background about the Turbonet, your welcome to find out it’s origins. The cards that they sell are very expensive, one would think that is solely because they’re proprietary but it doesn’t seem to be the case.
Storage
You will need a reasonably large Hard Drive for your Tivo. Some refurbished Tivo’s come with 80,120, or even 240GB of drive space. Maybe given the good New Zealand dollar it is cost effective to get one of those but if you buy your drive locally at least if it fails you can take it back and get it replaced. Tivo is not particularly fussy about Hard Drives but do consider the reliability, performance, noise, etc of a drive before you purchase. I won’t mention video encoding here except to say that I (and most others) always record at the highest quality, I think that the bitrate is 5mbit/s, which is around 2gb per hour of video. Work out what you think you’ll need or want to start with. See the Quick Start For the Gb/Hour Ratio table.
One caveat here is that you may find the Tivo menu’s slow down if you have alot of programmes recorded. There is a cache card (memory upgrade) that you can buy to remedy the situation, it comes with the Turbonet included, costs an extra $30US but you need to supply it with 512mb SDRAM. Maybe an option but consider that the Tivo can be a little annoying to operate when you have a tonne of programmes in the Now Showing list. Unfortunately the Tivo doesn’t have anything in the way of menu’s or directories for dealing with (cataloging) your recordings, just one long list that is listed in chronological order, you can change it to alphabetical ordering but that is all. An unfortunate thing indeed.
The Tivo supports two Hard Drives but you will need a mounting bracket for the second drive. You don’t need a mounting bracket but it is a very good idea. You can order from Eksys or from 9thtee.
Recommendations: Buy a Turbonet network card along with your order. Use any drive above 60gb.
Can the Tivo change the channel on an external decoder?
Yes the Tivo comes supplied with a device called an “IR Blaster”, an IR (infrared) transmitter that plugs into a stereo plug on the back of the Tivo. The transmitter is lined up with the IR sensor on the decoder box and the transmitter fires off the IR code (signal) when it needs to change channels. It’s a beautiful thing…
Note: For best results, place 1 IR Blaster about 30cm away fromt the IR panel of your STB. See Customizing for details on altering the IR Blaster channel change timings.
IR Codes
One caveat here is that you need to know/find the IR codes* for the device you are using. If you don’t have the IR codes you will have to go thru a bit of a lengthy process to make them, or find someone who has already done it before. Actually it’s not that lengthy… usuallly. But you’ll need a Pronto Universal remote and to follow some Howto’s. However, it’s not guaranteed, be warned here. If you can find someone who has the IR codes for your device then you can use them very easily. See this page for supported decoders, Tivo STB support.
- When I say codes what I think they’re referring to here is a text file with a list of remote control command (eg 0-9, up, down, enter, etc) and the corresponding IR code that the blaster hardware/software uses to fire off the correct IR signal. It’s actually a little confusing because the term codes gets used in two different contexts. One as the code used to produce a certain IR signal, and the other as the code number that corresponds to a code list file for a particular device, or rather. to a code number that is linked to a specified (code list) file on the file system. Don’t quote me tho…
Recommendations: See the Post Setup for a list of supported Sky Digital and Saturn decoders. If you do not already have Sky digital, you can try to request one of these for your new installation.
Can I get guide data (programme listings) for the Tivo?
Yes at present you can get get guide data for ‘free to air’, Saturn, and Sky digital channels. Just network your Tivo and it will download the information twice a week by default. The guide data is the TV programming schedule information. eg what is on at what time and on what channel and for how long (title, starting time, channel, duration, genre, etc).
Tivo can operate without guide data (manual recording) but it really limits the usefulness of the device. Having guide data; being able to see what you have recorded, having Tivo intelligently record programmes, suggest new programmes, etc is what really makes the Tivo shine.
In the old days, guide data for Tivo in countries without the Tivo service (eg Australia, New Zealand, parts of Europe, Canada, rest of world, etc) comes from culling online sources for TV listings, usually the satellite, cable, broadcast TV providers websites or other websites/portals that offer TV listings. The process of gathering the listings from a website is called ‘scraping’, the computer code that does the scraping is called a ‘grabber’ or ‘scraper’. Essentially you (or someone else) runs grabber code over a website each day or week, etc and it sucks out all of the information from the sites pages*. A good example of this is XMLTV, a (set of) programmes for downloading TV listings for a variety of different countries. Unfortunately for us Kiwi’s the NZ grabber component of XMLTV doesn’t work particularly well, the author having abandoned the code quite some time ago.
The modern approach is to leverage community effort to form the “community guide” data. This is generally a database oriented system where users input and enhance the community guide. These systems are designed to evolve as more data is input, they learn shows genres and so on. For an excellent overview through to some great detail look at the oztivo tvguide website.
The process of gathering guide data and converting the data into the Tivo format (called ‘slice creation’) was achieved by Wktivoguide 3.5, a homegrown Tivo slice generator. With a more modern database driven community guide slices are formed directly from the database. The Tivo specific data is made available online for anyone with a TiVo to use. No mess, no fuss… the Tivo downloads new community data on a regular basis, users contibute to the community by keeping the data up to date.
* One of the major problems of the old website scraping method is culling realiable data. Essentially all your’re doing is stripping out information from text files that are formatted with HTML. Unfortunately HTML is pretty loose in terms of having to be ‘well formed’ (ie having matching start/closing tags) and nicely formatted. This can make it more time consuming to code a scraper to reliably extract data. This was one of the problems with the NZ XMLTV grabber, it was way too hardcoded (brittle) to the existing/current TV listing sources. Anytime the website is changed (eg page names, paths, content, site structure, etc) more often than not you have to re-code your scrapper, this can be a tedious process.
Can I buy an NZ ready Tivo?
In short, NO because I and others are not keen to support a community of non-hobbyist Tivo users… they give nothing back, expect everything, and complain the loudest when things are broken. Who wants that?
Tivo is pretty simple to set up anyway and you really do need to know a little about how it works in order to modify it if we have to change something (eg the IP address for the guide data). So seriously, just get off your ass and do it yourself. If however, you want to setup your friends with Tivo’s (for a nominal fee), then sure, you can be the one they go to when things need changing or whatever. If your aim is to profit from Tivo I can assure you it will be considerably more difficult and troublesome than you would expect.
Telnet doesn’t work from Windows
Having trouble connecting via telnet (when you have a Turbonet) from Windows? Google for Putty – this small Windows app can telnet (and has other remote login protocols) into your Tivo box to run commands. Can be downloaded from Tucows
