Shortcut to put Tivo in standby?

[JohnB]

Hi,
I have searched the site and forums but can't find anything for this. Is there any shortcut for turning the Tivo on Standby? Don't think I can get it working with Trickey. Are there any suggestions? I can do it through the Tivo menu with about 5 button presses but want to avoid that! I like to turn it off whilst sleeping to reduce the noise and unprogrammed/unscheduled recording.

[Darren King]

I like to turn it off whilst sleeping to reduce the noise and unprogrammed/unscheduled recording.

Then "standby" won't do much for you. Apart from the video output signal being switched off the TiVo is still otherwise fully functional. Hard disk still records programs and live TV buffer and the TiVo still does all the usual housekeeping functions that would cause the hard disk to be normally read/write/seeking.

[JohnB]

Thanks, Darren. That explains why there's no real mention of standby mode on the site. There should be a modifed standby mode similar to what I thought it was doing, so it only records shows in the To Do list when it's in this standby mode that I'd want and spin down the disk. Cron jobs and the like might make it difficult I spin down completely though.

[Darren King]

To do something like that would mean no live TV buffering and the like. It would only be a saving of a few watts of power spinning down the hard disk compared to the overall power drawn by the motherboard which must be kept alive to do all the processing tasks a TiVo must perform. It's a moot point anyway as the core operating system ("myworld") of a TiVo cannot be modified as the application and/or source code has never been released to the public.

As another side issue on power consumption there is that other power waster called a "cachecard", which if fitted, takes a fair bit of power to constantly refresh the RAM. 512MB of dynamic RAM is a lot of memory cells that anyone knowing about electronics knows is made up of tiny charge cells that constantly need charging (refreshing). It's a lot of power (and electricity bill dollars) for what amounts to bringing up the recorded programs list a little quicker!