Vincent, thank you for the TiVo Rewards Referral.

From 12/27 through 12/31 Buy.com is having a sale on Roxio Toast 8 Titanium. While MSRP is $99.99, Buy.com is selling it for $57.99, and a $20 mail-in rebate brings it down to $37.99. Roxio Toast is the premier CD/DVD burning software for the Mac, and it has support for TiVo built-in. If you use a Mac and you just got a TiVo, of vice-versa, you might want to grab this deal.

A reader contacted me today to ask me about something odd he’s been experiencing with his TiVo Series3. He’s a Time Warner Cable user in Raleigh, NC, and lately they’ve been adding new HD channels using SDV in his area. The oddity is that he’s been able to tune in three of these channels - A&EHD, TBSHD, and GOLF/VSHD - on his Series3. This is odd because the S3 is physically incapable of tuning SDV channels, that’s what the Tuning Resolver that’s coming out in 2008 is for. He said that early on he got error messages that the channels were unavailable, as I’d expect, but that he’s been able to regularly tune them lately. This is very odd indeed, and I had three theories:

1. The channels aren’t actually SDV, but are standard linear channels and TWC just gave out bad info about them being SDV. The S3 would be able to tune these channels like any other cable channel. The earlier error messages could’ve been a coincidence - some unrelated problem. Or perhaps the guide was updated before the channels were live.

2. The channels did start out as SDV, but demand was high enough that they were always in use, so TWC just converted them to linear channels. That would explain the error and then the channels working regularly.

3. The channels are SDV, and someone else on his cable network segment has tuned the channels. When an SDV STB tunes an SDV channel the head end dynamically assigns the channel to a frequency and then tells the STB which frequency to tune for the channel. I suppose it is possible that this updated channel map is also being picked up by the CableCARDs in his S3, allowing him to tune in the SDV channel so long as someone else on his segment has previously requested it. He would lose access to the channel whenever no one else on his segment was viewing it. And it is just coincidence that his tests have fallen during times when the channels are in use.

Now, I did some poking around online, and from what I can tell those three channels are SDV in Raleigh, NC, and have been since they were added in October. That seems to indicate hypothesis number 3.

Has anyone else who lives in an area using SDV been able to tune SDV channels on their CableCARD TiVo? Can anyone else who lives in Raleigh confirm that these are SDV channels? Can you tune them, or any other SDV channels, with your TiVo?

I suppose the ultimate test would be someone who has SDV channels, a CableCARD TiVo, and a regular cable STB. Find an SDV channel that the TiVo cannot tune. Then tune that channel with your STB. That would cause the head-end to issue a frequency for the channel. Then try to tune it on your TiVo again. If it works on the TiVo, then we know the TiVo can tune SDV channels if they’re in use. Unfortunately, if it doesn’t work all it means is that it doesn’t work there. Different cable systems could handle the channel mapping data differently. So it not working in one location doesn’t mean the TiVo is incapable of doing it everywhere. (And it working in one location doesn’t mean it will work everywhere, but it does mean it could work.)

Bruce Perens over at Technocrat pointed out something I hadn’t even thought of, and that I don’t recall being discussed elsewhere - the pending possible failure of TV Guide On Screen (TVGOS) dependent devices. According to Gemstar, more than 25 million households have TVGOS devices. Many, probably most, of these devices obtain their data from a signal embedded in the local analog PBS station’s broadcast. While an updated version of TVGOS which can use data from digital stations was released in 2006, most of the installed devices are analog-only.

The Gemstar TVGOS guide system was, and is, used in many TVs, VCRs, DVD recorders, and even DVRs. The Sony CableCARD DVRs, the DHG-HDD250 and DHG-HDD500, rely on TVGOS for not only their guide data, but also to set their clocks.

What will happen to all of these devices when the analog broadcasts cease on (or before) February 11, 2009? Even if you don’t use antenna, if the local PBS station goes all digital, the feed to your cable provider would be from the digital source. Even if the cable provider continued to provide the channel in analog form, it would be unlikely to contain the TVGOS data as the source feed would not. It seems likely that these devices will simply cease to function, or at least suffer a major loss of features, when the guide data is no longer available. It is already known that the Sony DVRs wouldn’t work in some areas of the country where the TVGOS data was simply unavailable as it was not carried by any of the stations.

Steve Garfield is continuing to report on his new Comcast TiVo software. And, unsurprisingly as he’s a video blogger, he’s also made his first video report on the software, focusing on the Guide:

The “archaic, stupid cable rule” that he refers to in the video would be OCAP. I think he got that from a comment I left on one of his earlier posts.

I’m a bit jealous, as a blogger. I wouldn’t give up my standalone Series3 for the OCAP software, but if I could I would have one in my home just to be able to test it and report on it. Maybe one of my friends will get it and let me come over and molest their DVR for a while. I live in MA, where Comcast is deploying this software currently. However, while much of MA is Comcast, I live in Worcester, an island of Charter monopoly.

Since some of you may be newcomers to the world of TiVo, and some of you old hands might not be aware of all the tips and tricks, I’ve compiled a Getting Started with TiVo guide. It has been updated with more information, and I hope it makes using your TiVo a little easier and more enjoyable. Just the backdoors and shortcuts should make life a bit easier with TiVo.

I was playing around with my TiVo Series3 recently and I thought I’d see if there were any new backdoor codes, like SPS30S for 30-second skip or SPS9S for the on-screen clock. I didn’t really expect to find anything, but I was bored, and I’m a geek. But I did find something - SPS7S. It puts a kind of ‘map’ over the image of the video you’re watching. It appears to be some kind of calibration map designed to show how much overscan your TV has.

I’d never seen this before, and it seems to only work on HD TiVos - the Series3 and TiVo HD. Doing some digging around online it looks like this code has been on the HR10-250 HD DirecTiVo for a while, so it was probably inherited from there. But I could’ve sworn I’d checked all the SPSxS codes on my S3 in the past without finding this. So I’m not sure if it was there before 9.2a.

On other units, SPS7S has been a backdoor to disable display of the playback progress bar and the information banner.

It is probably more a curiosity than useful, but I thought I’d share. If you get a new TiVo Series3 or TiVo HD and it comes with older software (pre-9.2a), give this a try and see what you get. I’m curious if this has always been in the S3/HD code base, or, if not, when it was added.