An Insidious Plot – A DirecTivo Update

A quick lunchtime update on the DirecTivo situation: Just heard back from my wife, who spoke to Weaknees. They ran diagnostics on our DirecTivo Samsung DVR, and there are no disk problems, no tuner problems, and presumably no power problems. So what is causing the system to reboot? Seems they have been getting lots of calls from original DirecTivo owners complaining of these reboots. I just took a look at the DBSTalk forums, and there are lots of folks having the same problem. It is also being reported in the Tivo Community Forums and in the DirecTV forums on the DirecTV website. I just wish I had discovered this before I paid the diagnosis fee, but at least we are ending up with a larger disk, programming and such transferred, and knowledge that the tuners are good. ETA 11/15: Weaknees has also posted a blog entry on the problem (h/t Carl K.).

What is the answer to the problem? That’s harder. I’ve seen one comment that it might be a problem in the Guide Data stream. Someone else noted that there was a very similar problem about 2 years ago, starting in late September/October and lasting about a month. That time, the problem was with the software and a patch was required. Yet another person surmised that they are removing advanced EPG stream by end of year, and they could testing for that, resulting in the reboots. A number of people think it is a plot by DirecTV to force people to the new HD Tivos. In general, the notion appears to be to call DirecTV and complain, complain, complain.

One person on the forums called DirecTV and got more information. They learned from DirecTV corporate that there is a software issue with the older TiVo’s and that they were waiting on enough complaints to institute a software upgrade.  As of 11/11, DirecTV was supposedly working on the software update; supposedly, if it does not work, they will replace those DVR’s with the software problem at no charge based upon what type of DVR you have (same for same). [Of course, that is useless for those with loads of saved programming and larger disks.] According to DirecTV, “If enough people with these TiVo’s complain about the reboots, a faster update will occur”

I hope DirecTV figures out the software fix. I’m annoyed enough that they forced me into a repair I didn’t need to make. I don’t want to lose the saved programs or have the upgraded disk capacity be for naught.

(ETA 11/14/12: I’ve submitted an email to DirecTV regarding this problem. Given I just paid almost $200 to repair/upgrade the Samsung, about the only offer I would accept would be a current DirecTivo, with no changes in fees (i.e., even if it is an HD Tivo, no HD fees as we don’t have an HDTV), and I would want to be able to keep the old Tivo until we watched all the programming stored on it.)