Tivo in New Zealand

[zollymonsta]

Weeeee Hoooo!!!

Let's get some convo going about getting Tivo working in New Zealand.

*dribbles incoherently*

Still trying to track down a series 1 tivo to buy, lemme know if you have one spare :D

[guerre]

Hi zolly!

The best places to get your TiVo from are either George at www.eksys.com (I got mine from him and he is very very helpful and will accommodate most requests for variations in psting methods, etc., will install a turbonet card for you if you buy one amongst other things.) He sells factory refurbished Philips Series 1 TiVos, which is what you want.

Or, alternatively, just do a search on ebay.com and go for a Philips Series 1 on there. If you want to try to win an auction on ebay, try out bidnapper - www.bidnapper.com - it works brilliantly and I've won every auction I've entered with it.

Cheers and good luck. :D

[zollymonsta]

Thanks for that, I've bookmarked their site. I notice they're not shipping at the moment so I'll send them an email and find out when they are, and their prices.
Bidsniper sounds rather interesting. I've seen quite a few tivo's on ebay (series 1), sadly they all have hard drives and usually have a reserve of a couple of hundred (combined with no shipping outside of the USA).

Cheers.

[curto]

Just to Note George at Eksys was/is on holidays until the 28th (USA). He will be back then and i am sure will help - i have had heaps of help from him.

Also note that getting him to ship the Turbonet cards with your TIVO will save you a heap on shipping charges as against buying separately from 9th Tee in the USA.

Craig

[zollymonsta]

Yep. I mentioned I'm interested in having a turbonet card fitted too.. plus noted, no hard drives installed, but the bracket so I could mount two inside.

Oh, and asked prices for two.. as a friend wants to get one too. :)

I shall sit and wait to hear back from him. :)

Thanks

[Benji]

According tot he Fedex tracking website, it's on a truck heading in my general direction :) I got mine from PowerOn (www.poweron.com) although they weren't to easy to deal with on shipping options, it is here 5 days after I payed for it.

Lets all get stuck in and get the NZ community up and running!

Cheers

B

[zollymonsta]

According tot he Fedex tracking website, it's on a truck heading in my general direction :) I got mine from PowerOn (www.poweron.com) although they weren't to easy to deal with on shipping options, it is here 5 days after I payed for it.

Lets all get stuck in and get the NZ community up and running!

Cheers

B

I've looked at Poweron's site, but according to their website they're not currently shipping (?) Perhaps I missed the boat :) I'm waiting to see if I hear back from George at the other place mentioned above. I may hear tommorow *fingers crossed*

Yep, a NZ Tivo community would be good. :) Along with a NZ Dedicated CD Setup ISO (rather than using the Aussie one and using different settings... something which I don't even have any ideas about as of yet) ;)

Did you get a turbonet card as well Benji?

[Benji]

Actually I picked up a cachecard instead, the $30 price difference seemed worth it, and the speed increase is supposed to be reasonable. I'm a little concerned as they've (9th-tee) rev'd the firmware on the cards, so I hope I get a updated model as there were some video issues with the previous firmware and some Tivos.

Agreed on the ISO idea, Tim from www.tjv.info has been mumbling about it, and also offers a partly finished FAQ + unstall guide for Sky Digital users, and is also spinning guide data, so I've been following his lead on this, so far so good as I've been able to image a drive using the 1.3 oztivo image and at least boot mine :)

It would be good to see some coordination of efforts and resources.

Cheers

B

[zollymonsta]

Agreed on the ISO idea, Tim from www.tjv.info has been mumbling about it, and also offers a partly finished FAQ + unstall guide for Sky Digital users, and is also spinning guide data, so I've been following his lead on this, so far so good as I've been able to image a drive using the 1.3 oztivo image and at least boot mine :)
B

Excellent! I ordered mine this morning thru George at eksys. Ordered the network card at the same time (save money on freight).

So have you been able to get your Tivo fully working off the Oztivo image?
I've been reading the setup guide but unsure what you do when you get to the area code settings (seeing as we're in NZ).

There will be a few sleepless nights here until my Tivo safely arrives. :D

[Benji]

Tims page (www.tjv.info) , his FAQ and setup guide are NZ specific and walk you through it. I'm still waiting on the cachecard, and my sky install, however I've imaged a drive and installed the cachcard drivers, put it in my tiv and it boots! So at least a small measure of success. Networking next, then the customisation for NZ.

Cheers

B

[zollymonsta]

Oh yes, I missed that page :) Thanks for that.

[timmy]

hi guys,

Good to see your putting this forum to use..

In response to NZ Tivo images, I am working on one right now but i'm not too keen on the idea tho, the biggest problem at the moment is that there is nowhere to host the images. I think I can squeze one onto my website if i'm lucky :o

man, all I really wanted to do was to get NZ Tivo out into the open, that has been achieved... I'm satisfied with it, prior to my site there was jack all NZ tivo info, now you can google nz tivo or any combination of words like it and find your way to my site reasonably quickly and get some straight answers.
It's not the be all and end all, it's just some info I chucked up so people know it exists and can get started...

I get people emailing me asking why I don't have NZ Images, well christ buddy I'm not really keen to support a bunch of dumbasses like yourself.. hehe

Ideally we should be running an emulator like oztivo. I'd like some others to take it to the next stage. I'm happy to help make slices but not really keen to support a community of Tivo users who haven't bothered to learn anything at all about Tivo because they just used the NZ Tivo Image. My feeling is that maybe further down the track when Tivo is more established and it's more stable and customized for NZ then that would be great but at the moment is still at a bit of a rough stage and to try and support non-hobbyist users is not particularly wise.

thoughts guys?

[zollymonsta]

I'm keen to do all I can to help get a NZ image off the ground. I'm no programmer though, so that's the only problem :)

Yep, hosting the image could always be a problem. I wonder if the OzTivo guys would mind having a NZ image available on their site in the short-term?

ZollyMonsta

[Benji]

With the hosting side of the problem, but my coding sucks.

I agree that the community is way to small at the moment to start trying to create and support an NZ ISO and certainly not big enough to get to the emulator stage. In the long run we'll all be better off if the community is built up with people who've had to get their Tivo's running the hard way.

Cheers

B

[number6]

hi guys,

Good to see your putting this forum to use..

In response to NZ Tivo images, I am working on one right now but i'm not too keen on the idea tho, the biggest problem at the moment is that there is nowhere to host the images. I think I can squeze one onto my website if i'm lucky :o


I think the best place to host these is via the oztivo file area for now.
Hosting images is a sure fire way to get into trouble with TiVo Inc, so we should consider throwing our lot in with the OzTivo crowd on this one - a sort of "safety in numbers" approach.





man, all I really wanted to do was to get NZ Tivo out into the open, that has been achieved... I'm satisfied with it, prior to my site there was jack all NZ tivo info, now you can google nz tivo or any combination of words like it and find your way to my site reasonably quickly and get some straight answers.
It's not the be all and end all, it's just some info I chucked up so people know it exists and can get started...

I get people emailing me asking why I don't have NZ Images, well christ buddy I'm not really keen to support a bunch of dumbasses like yourself.. hehe

Ideally we should be running an emulator like oztivo. I'd like some others to take it to the next stage. I'm happy to help make slices but not really keen to support a community of Tivo users who haven't bothered to learn anything at all about Tivo because they just used the NZ Tivo Image. My feeling is that maybe further down the track when Tivo is more established and it's more stable and customized for NZ then that would be great but at the moment is still at a bit of a rough stage and to try and support non-hobbyist users is not particularly wise.

thoughts guys?

I second that - in fact I'd go so far as to say a std diclaimer is needed along the lines of "you must be this smart to hack your Tivo".
And of course, the "no commericial operations using information on or from this site are permitted" should also be put in place, or the forum will be overrun with newbies and "I want a Tivo but can't be bothered learning all the pitfalls and how to manage it".
If this happens all those that could assist them (like you and me Tim] will move on to other things - this is what has happened elsewhere in other TiVo forums.

A emulator like OzTivo yes - we need one of those, but again it should be hosted as part of the OzTivo setup - there is no reason why the OzTivo guys couldn't host our slices and headends for us - it seems a waste of effort to duplicate what the OzTivo guys have already built, so lets leverage that to start.
Perhaps later on we can implement our own infrastructure like Oztivo has done, but not right away.

Also, we need some thought into how to come with up a way to build headends for all these new folks who will be joining from all over the country - with attendant lists of channels and VHF/UHF frequencies.
We could put up a website somewhere that let you pick and choose all the channels you get [ala Guided setup]. I'm not sure if the OzTivo folks have the headend bit sorted out themselves yet.

I'm all for using proper headends as thats the "Tivo Way" and it can simplify things a little - if we can leverage the OzTivo work in this area great, if not, we have to tackle it some other way.

A big problem I see with Headends is the lack of "unique localisation" identifier.
The US has zipcodes, the UK 6 character Postal codes and OzTivo have those state codes, which means a headend for a geographic area can be constructed in short order.

However many parts of NZ have VHF/UHF local repeater stations which means that the local standard channel frequencies are not usuable for some of the channels these folks get and alternate channel numbers/frequencies are used - how to define and manage this?

Do we simply give up and say "learn to use Tivoweb" instead?

Of course, if we only support "cable" and Sky Digital and forget about Free-To-Air then a single headend can cover those I think.

[timmy]

hey number6 good to see you found your way here :)

Quite keen on the headend slices but not sure how to manually load headend slices, u know? Time is a little stretched to try and figure it out. Would be cool tho to at least make a couple of standard ones, ie fta, sky,saturn. :)

[jaidev]

Yea managing the FTA headends is going to be a little tricky, how many diff frequencies for each channel are there?
I haven't had time yet to even get my tuner going with 3.0. Number6 bedises the UK palmod, is does the current oztivo palmod work in Auckland? I remember that TV2 wasn't working with previous versions. Also someone on the oztivo list made a palmod with finetuning enabled, i.e. with a loading parameter you could adjust the frequencies? Will that work?

[jaidev]

man, all I really wanted to do was to get NZ Tivo out into the open, that has been achieved... I'm satisfied with it, prior to my site there was jack all NZ tivo info, now you can google nz tivo or any combination of words like it and find your way to my site reasonably quickly and get some straight answers.
It's not the be all and end all, it's just some info I chucked up so people know it exists and can get started...

Ideally we should be running an emulator like oztivo. I'd like some others to take it to the next stage. I'm happy to help make slices but not really keen to support a community of Tivo users who haven't bothered to learn anything at all about Tivo because they just used the NZ Tivo Image. My feeling is that maybe further down the track when Tivo is more established and it's more stable and customized for NZ then that would be great but at the moment is still at a bit of a rough stage and to try and support non-hobbyist users is not particularly wise.

thoughts guys?

I have created a sticky thread titled "NZ TiVo Newbie? Start here.." currently it points to Tim's faq and howto site.
If you want anything more added please let me know...

cheers,
Jaidev

[number6]

Yea managing the FTA headends is going to be a little tricky, how many diff frequencies for each channel are there?
I haven't had time yet to even get my tuner going with 3.0. Number6 bedises the UK palmod, is does the current oztivo palmod work in Auckland? I remember that TV2 wasn't working with previous versions. Also someone on the oztivo list made a palmod with finetuning enabled, i.e. with a loading parameter you could adjust the frequencies? Will that work?

The UK PALMOD I did works fine on all TV channels.

I believe that the US PALMOD (v3) now has been extended to support NZ TV channels - not sure if someone copied my table out of the UK PALMOD source or rolled their own, from memory the VHF Channel 1 frequency is wrong so they probably copied the crap on the Dick Smith website or something.

I don't have a cross-compiler to build a US series PALMOD and strongly recommend that you ask nicely for someone in OzTivo to get the existing channel list out of the UK PALMOD I did and put/merge it in to the Series 3 (US) PALMOD code for NZ.

Then cross-compile it and you'll probably be able to get some FTA channels fi your Tuner hardware's I2C address is supported.
If not either get a Samsung tuner or ask (nicely) for the I2C device address you need to be supported by the PALMOD.