Virgin Media Tivo

DonDaddyD

Mr Sworld wrote:

DonDaddyD wrote:

40mb broadband is the proposed figure, it all depends on how close you are to the exchange and some other stuff. 'Fibre optics' help, but I'm not sure you really get 40mb download/upload speed.

Fibre doesn't work like that. It's fibre to the box in your street and copper to the doorstep. The max speed is 130MB at the moment.

Never had anything less than what Virgin has promised me. The 1MB upload speed is a bit shite however.

And as for a Tivo.... HTPC with twin Freesat decoder for me, I am thinking about Tivo as XBMC will work with it apparently...

Ah I see. To be honest I'm with O2 and insist (despite Ms D's protests as it prevents her from shutting the living room door) on having a CAT5 cable connecting my PC to the wireless router. I get better download/upload speeds that way.

sketchley

noodles71 wrote:

As I already had a V+ box I just decided on extending the recording capacity instead of spending the money with Virgin. This was before Thailand went under water when it was a lot cheaper. I can only find a 1.5tb available at the moment for £98. I bought a 2 terabyte Western Digital AV hard drive (WD AV-GP WD20EURS) that only cost me £30 more than the "Activation" fee for the Tivo and now I get similar features and never run out of space. I also get to pull it out and keep it when I get rid of the V+ box too which is a bonus so the £50 activation fee saved is for me and not Virgin.

I've got stacks of stuff recorded and I still have 79 hours out of 80 hours space left. The only thing that goes weird is the space remaining counter seems to have very very long hours. It will eventually get down to 78 hours soon The other advantage is I was able to make the scratch area of the disk bigger so it can hold more pause/rewind history before it forces you to hit the play button or automatically unpauses itself.

You know I assume you don't own the box you simply rent it? You know I assume that you are in breech to the T&Cs in modifying it?

As soon as my wife has caught up on her recorded programs then TiVo is coming.....

sketchley

Blacktemplar wrote:

How does that work? Do you just plug into a USB/SATA port and the V+ box detects it as an external HDD or something? I have 2 x 1tb drives for my PC but only use one of them, although they're not an 'AV' HDD.

Then you should configure them as RAID drives so if one fails your data is safe on the other......

spen666

walkingbootweather wrote:

I had a good look at the various Sky v Virgin Media offerings last year and decide to plump for...


... Neither!

In theory TIVO is the better option, but it apparently still doesn't work quite right and VM customer service sucks big time (I won't bore you with the details but my experience with them was dreadful). I couldn't bring myself to contribute further to the Murdoch empire.

In the end we bought a couple of Freesat boxes which connected fine to existing satelite dish. For £170 one off payment each we get over 150 channels of which at least 20 odd are 'watchable', digital radio, iplayer, 500GB recording capacity. Unless you must have sky sports, sky one etc. Freesat is IMHO the way to go.

Is that watchable as in you can get a decent picture or watchable in terms of content of programmes?

Gazzaputt

DonDaddyD wrote:

40mb broadband is the proposed figure, it all depends on how close you are to the exchange and some other stuff. 'Fibre optics' help, but I'm not sure you really get 40mb download/upload speed.

Err no.

Virgin is fibre and you talking about copper.

I pay for 20mb and get on average 18.75mb (speedtest.net)

As I said call and mention free activation and install and they'll give it to you new or exsiting customer.

The sales even had my old Samsung box replaced with a new HD box so now have 3 HD boxes in the house. Missus happy, kids happy and me happy. We all live seperate lives now!

Fat-Boy-Roubaix

Anyone know if you can get the Tivo box to read and play from the network?

redvee

Fat-Boy-Roubaix wrote:

Anyone know if you can get the Tivo box to read and play from the network?

Reading from various places, this is something VM have disabled. I'd like to be able to see the content of my Tivo on my PC but can't Network cable from Tivo to Router and played with the network settings on PC and Tivo and failed.

spen666

Mr Sworld wrote:

DonDaddyD wrote:

40mb broadband is the proposed figure, it all depends on how close you are to the exchange and some other stuff. 'Fibre optics' help, but I'm not sure you really get 40mb download/upload speed.

Fibre doesn't work like that. It's fibre to the box in your street and copper to the doorstep. The max speed is 130MB at the moment.

Never had anything less than what Virgin has promised me. The 1MB upload speed is a bit shite however.

...

you're lucky - my 20mb Virgin broadband last night was giving me a speed of 0.19mb/s! Third seperate complaint to chief executive's office. It gets to the stage where they fix it ( for a few months) and give me loads of free months of broadband.

Wish they'd jut increase the capacity in the area once and for all

notsoblue

We just got a (free, I think) upgrade to ~150mbit Virgin Fibre Optic.

8)

asprilla

Any Sky multi room users? Pretty soon the boxes are going to be aware of each other and you'll be able to playback what was recorded on the other boxes on any other box in the household, provided they are connected to the phone line.

mudcow007

Fat-Boy-Roubaix wrote:

Anyone know if you can get the Tivo box to read and play from the network?

i will give it a whirl when i get mine (3rd March)

Mr Sworld

redvee wrote:

Fat-Boy-Roubaix wrote:

Anyone know if you can get the Tivo box to read and play from the network?

Reading from various places, this is something VM have disabled. I'd like to be able to see the content of my Tivo on my PC but can't Network cable from Tivo to Router and played with the network settings on PC and Tivo and failed.

Hmm.. Bugger. XBMC is supposed to see Tivo and intergrate it into the media server but that might be the US Tivo's only.

noodles71

noodles71 wrote:

As I already had a V+ box I just decided on extending the recording capacity instead of spending the money with Virgin. This was before Thailand went under water when it was a lot cheaper. I can only find a 1.5tb available at the moment for £98. I bought a 2 terabyte Western Digital AV hard drive (WD AV-GP WD20EURS) that only cost me £30 more than the "Activation" fee for the Tivo and now I get similar features and never run out of space. I also get to pull it out and keep it when I get rid of the V+ box too which is a bonus so the £50 activation fee saved is for me and not Virgin.

I've got stacks of stuff recorded and I still have 79 hours out of 80 hours space left. The only thing that goes weird is the space remaining counter seems to have very very long hours. It will eventually get down to 78 hours soon The other advantage is I was able to make the scratch area of the disk bigger so it can hold more pause/rewind history before it forces you to hit the play button or automatically unpauses itself.

Sketchley wrote:

You know I assume you don't own the box you simply rent it? You know I assume that you are in breech to the T&Cs in modifying it?

As soon as my wife has caught up on her recorded programs then TiVo is coming.....

Sure it is rented but I can always replace my new disk back with the original disk. I doubt very much if they will cut me off and if they do it will be their loss of revenue as I would then just start up a card spider on a Dreambox and watch all the programs for free anyhow. The only problem then would be trying to teach the Mrs about smartcard encryption and how to defeat ECM jamming and setting up VPN tunnels. Far easier to just pay for it than have her ringing up when I am doing something more important than trying to remotely get the TV up and working again.

Sketchley wrote:

Blacktemplar wrote:

How does that work? Do you just plug into a USB/SATA port and the V+ box detects it as an external HDD or something? I have 2 x 1tb drives for my PC but only use one of them, although they're not an 'AV' HDD.

Then you should configure them as RAID drives so if one fails your data is safe on the other......

You need to image the 1st and 2nd partition on the original hard disk using something like Clonezilla as this contains information unique to your box. You can then alter the size of the 3rd partition to make a bigger scratch area for pause/rewind and then leave the remaining space to the 4th partition for recorded programs. I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you have some experience with Linux and know all the pitfalls with cloning applications (like cloning a blank drive over the live one).

The USB ports on the V+ boxes are disabled and I have yet to find a method to enable them. Even if you could, the encryption is specific to the box so you couldn't watch the recorded programs on a PC or anywhere else without some significant hacking. The skills needed to do this would have you in a job where you could afford to have a Tivo in every room.

I would recommend RAID too but without knowing how it works and having another spare disk to backup to while you implement it I would definitely steer clear. All desktop PC's only have software RAID built into the motherboard and not an external controller like you would find in servers. I'd be less confident recovering a RAID problem on a desktop than I would on a server.

mudcow007

http://virgintivo.blogspot.com/p/network-your-tivo.html

walkingbootweather

spen666 wrote:

walkingbootweather wrote:

I had a good look at the various Sky v Virgin Media offerings last year and decide to plump for...


... Neither!

In theory TIVO is the better option, but it apparently still doesn't work quite right and VM customer service sucks big time (I won't bore you with the details but my experience with them was dreadful). I couldn't bring myself to contribute further to the Murdoch empire.

In the end we bought a couple of Freesat boxes which connected fine to existing satelite dish. For £170 one off payment each we get over 150 channels of which at least 20 odd are 'watchable', digital radio, iplayer, 500GB recording capacity. Unless you must have sky sports, sky one etc. Freesat is IMHO the way to go.

Is that watchable as in you can get a decent picture or watchable in terms of content of programmes?

The quality of picture and sound is excellent on all channels, it's just that I wouldn't choose to watch some of them, or they are duplicates. We get both HD and 'regular' versions of the main channels, all the various regional versions of BBC, a number of the delayed +1 channels etc. List of Freesat channels here

optimisticbiker

DonDaddyD wrote:

40mb broadband is the proposed figure, it all depends on how close you are to the exchange and some other stuff. 'Fibre optics' help, but I'm not sure you really get 40mb download/upload speed.

I'm on VM 30Mbps soon to be upgraded to 60Mbps. I get close to the advertised download speed, it never drops below 20Mbps and that is simply due to contention at the exchange and I can predict pretty much when thats going to happen. Upload is fixed at 2Mbps. Cos I sometimes work at home, I connect through the VPN to the office and can remote access all our production servers etc and then the BB speed helps (especially if my kids are gaming or watching iplayer or whatever).

If I had a copper connection (BT/Sky) it would be about 6Mbps max given the distance. When BT Infinity finally arrives in my area (supposedly already here according to BT website but strangely BT can't supply it yet or give an expected install date) it might be a tad quicker, but I have 2 VM phones and the TV as well at a 'negotiated' price.

Not sure Tivo box will give me anything I dont have now that I really need. *edit*OK, having just read up on it, I might be a tad wrong there... but when would I get the chance to watch it all?

sketchley

mudcow007 wrote:

Fat-Boy-Roubaix wrote:

Anyone know if you can get the Tivo box to read and play from the network?

i will give it a whirl when i get mine (3rd March)

The virgin tivo, no you can't. But it does have apps, so there might be an app for it in the future. Also it has it's own Internet connection so is not on your network.

Fat-Boy-Roubaix

But it has an ethernet, looked at the link on this thread and it looked like it could find files but prevented it from playing due to copyright!!

I came from Sky and not overly impressed with Virgin, and even less so as I had a letter from them yesterday informing me that everything is going up.

rick_chasey

Fat-Boy-Roubaix wrote:

But it has an ethernet, looked at the link on this thread and it looked like it could find files but prevented it from playing due to copyright!!

I came from Sky and not overly impressed with Virgin, and even less so as I had a letter from them yesterday informing me that everything is going up.

Indeed. As expensive as Sky is, they've frozen their rates for this year.

sketchley

Rick Chasey wrote:

Fat-Boy-Roubaix wrote:

But it has an ethernet, looked at the link on this thread and it looked like it could find files but prevented it from playing due to copyright!!

I came from Sky and not overly impressed with Virgin, and even less so as I had a letter from them yesterday informing me that everything is going up.

Indeed. As expensive as Sky is, they've frozen their rates for this year.

Yep I saw the link after I posted. The v+ and tivo boxes have an ethernet port, in the past these have always been disabled. I didn't know they had enabled the tivo one. I'm quite interested in the other way round, rather than Tivo streaming content to other devices, it would be good if I could stream to Tivo from my DNLA server.

First.Aspect

I've got one.

It works rather like a video recorder. You record stuff and its pretty much as crap as it always was, only you didn't stay up as late to find out.

Unlike a video recorder, the top isn't flat enough to put a potted plant on. Bummer.

Canny Jock

Sketchley wrote:

Rick Chasey wrote:

Fat-Boy-Roubaix wrote:

But it has an ethernet, looked at the link on this thread and it looked like it could find files but prevented it from playing due to copyright!!

I came from Sky and not overly impressed with Virgin, and even less so as I had a letter from them yesterday informing me that everything is going up.

Indeed. As expensive as Sky is, they've frozen their rates for this year.

Yep I saw the link after I posted. The v+ and tivo boxes have an ethernet port, in the past these have always been disabled. I didn't know they had enabled the tivo one. I'm quite interested in the other way round, rather than Tivo streaming content to other devices, it would be good if I could stream to Tivo from my DNLA server.

I'd be interested to know if you get that working.

Wasn't overly impressed with the TiVo at first, although it has grown on me. I like the fact it now records all cycling for me, as it's a pain to trawl through and work out when it's on, and being able to set it to record using an app on the phone is pretty handy.

Fat-Boy-Roubaix

I do wonder if there will be an app for viewing files stored on a PC/Harddrive.

Boxee springs to mind, but I do not think Virgin will do it.

That link does look like it reviews the Copyright, so it was contact the the internet to download the programme details.

Might give it a go this weekend, maybe a simple fix of the file title would mean it cannot find any copyright issues.

Drysuitdiver

we have had one for coming up to 12 months now. we paid the activation/installation fee and a month later Virgin refunded it as the pricing policy had changed. If you go into the settings you can get the overrun of programmes issue sorted. we lobve it but the onoly issue i have is not being able to get S4C in London as the sky bods can. menas i miss welsh rugby on a friday night. the red buttion doing Iplayer also annoys me but apparently its going to go back to the proper red button april time.

we kept the old V+ box and they moved it up into the master bedroom so we have HD telly there now too.

just need to teach my eldest daughter not to fill it full of yank teen programmes