Frozen Remote

[DavidClarke]

Every couple of days my Tivo stops talking to my Tivo remote. The symptoms are that pressing buttons on the remote causes nothing to happen.

If I reboot the Tivo then all is OK again.... for 2, 3, 4 days and then same problem. Searched here and everywhere else but no suggestions.

Anyone encounter this?

[zollymonsta]

From memory, it is a known 'added feature'. A reboot of the TiVo will fix this.
Either pull the power cord out, wait 10 seconds or so and put it back.. or at the telnet prompt type

reboot


You can also set a cron job to automatically issue a reboot every day or couple of days in the early hour of the morning. That way you will most likely never have the issue again.

[thomson]

Every couple of days my Tivo stops talking to my Tivo remote. The symptoms are that pressing buttons on the remote causes nothing to happen.

This is known as the 3.0 Event Bug. Check out the link for possible solutions. The interesting thing is that only some people see it.. which does imply it is more environmental (such as noisy remotes, etc) than build related. I would suggest staying away from some of the TivoWeb modules (such as Phone, etc) as this has helped some people.

I would be intereted if a regular reboot does help, because that would imply that a process is either "leaking" or slowing filling up it's internal queue... in which case it should be possible to find the offending process and fix it (or avoid it).

[DavidClarke]

Thanks, this is exactly what is happening. Seems to occur without access to TivoWeb - such as when I am away and not using the web browser, so will limit access but suspect the memory leakage or a buffer overrun would be a possibility.

Not a great situation. Will do some research as its a very new thing, hasn't occured in the previous 3 -4 months and then 4 times in two weeks.

The tivo has been moved just prior to this to a place with less ventilation and its been quite warm. So temperature may be a factor, will bore some more holes and see if I can get the temp down a degree or two.

Any other suggestions gratefully received ;-)

[thomson]

Any other suggestions gratefully received ;-)

The logs files (/var/log/tvlog, tverr, etc) are a good place to look. You might be able to see what is causing the problem. If there is a lot of IR interference then it may show up in the logs.

[tenty]

I know people complain about TiVo lockups, but I've encountered the problem before and then if you wait 2 mins, the TiVo will become responsive again. I was wondering if others find that TiVo locks up indefinatly, or like mine, for anywhere up to a max of 5 mins?

[petestrash]

I was wondering if others find that TiVo locks up indefinatly, or like mine, for anywhere up to a max of 5 mins?

I have experienced both types of lockups many times, but the event bug one is by far the most common.

The temporary one's usually occur when the tivo is busy doing something and the IR commands get stuck in a queue with other processes, once the queue clears you can see all the stored keypresses sent in a instant and the TiVo is back to normal.

It's easy to see if it's the permanent one, as it kills tivoweb. Also even after an hour or two the remote will still be unresponsive if the TiVo hasn't rebooted itself in the meantime.

Peter.