I have been a happy OzTivo owner for many years. I have a HD STB and a standard Foxtel Satellite box happily purring away.

Recently I found the number of recording conflicts starting to increase, especially with the padding required to get all the show on FTA channels, so I thought I would look at a Foxtel IQ with its dual tuners.

As it turned out there is a special running, and we actually got the IQ with free installation and more channels for less money than we were already paying, and there was an installation slot available the next Saturday. So we signed up.

My plan was to reduce the OzTivo’s role to just FTA and let the IQ do all the Foxtel and some FTA as well, perhaps eventually I would not need the OzTivo at all.

I also made the assumption that the IQ would provide similar functionality to what I was used to with the OzTivo........ How wrong I was.

To be frank, the IQ user interface is complete rubbish. The ancient TiVo S1 craps all over it and from a great height as well. The simplest of functions in the TiVo like searching by title is not available in the IQ. It has no sense of a seasons pass manager and the useless “series link” system is not even available on all shows. I can’t say it strongly enough, compared to OzTivo IQ is really really really bad.

I can only imagine how good the current generation of TiVo’s must be if the S1 still holds up so well.

Well as the depression was starting to really set in, I thought I would just go back to configuring my system the way it was with just the IQ STB in place of the old Foxtel STB. However I can’t seem to find a reliable IR set for the IQ (Pace TDS480NF).

This is one of the worst decisions I have made, and I can’t think of a configuration that will return me to the bliss that is OzTivo. All other solutions are either FTA only or Foxtel only there is nothing I have found that does both with a good (as good as TiVo) user interface.

So before I jump off a cliff, does anybody have any ideas?

Cheers

Rohan