# TiVo Fever (New TiVo Roamio User)



## chachster (Dec 29, 2003)

Thanks to eboydog I got a Roamio Basic (upgraded to 3TB) that I purchased from him and will be getting that going today. Now I am looking to convert everything over to Tivo. 

Need to cover 6 rooms. (currently have 1 cable box from TWC)

Looking at adding:
Roamio Pro
Roamio Plus
3 Minis
Network them using moca until I get cat5 ran to all locations.

Is it overkill to have a Basic, Plus and Pro? 

I'm in with the Basic... it's the first. Should I just add minis? I'm thinking of a Pro in case I want to play with streaming as it's built in and will give me a total of 10 tuners (6 in the Pro and 4 in the Basic)

I used tivo with DirecTV years ago but have been away since then and I know technology changes. 

Advice, suggestions, etc would be great.

Here is what my initial layout thought was (as I plan on getting a Tivo code to get that deal)
1 - Roamio Plus w/Lifetime
1 - Roamio Pro w/Lifetime
3 - Minis w/Lifetime 
1 - Roamio Basic w/9.99/mo service
2 - Moca adaptors
1 - POE Filter
1 - Slide Pro Remote

To take advantage of the "deal" but may go with just

Then I am looking at the warranty and have been reading that as a one time use but with lifetime I'm unsure.

Thanks in advance!


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

How many people live in your house? If it is just you, then you might be able to get away with just the basic Roamio and lots of minis. But if you have other people living in the house then you will probably want more than the 4 tuners you have with the basic. 

Your above plan looks pretty good to me, though having a basic, Plus, and Pro in the same house might be a little overkill, but again that would depend on how many people live with you and how many tuners you could possibly need at any one time.


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## mcluvin (Apr 29, 2014)

I'd buy more slide pros. I hate where the guide button is on the mini remote.


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## chachster (Dec 29, 2003)

tarheelblue32 said:


> How many people live in your house? If it is just you, then you might be able to get away with just the basic Roamio and lots of minis. But if you have other people living in the house then you will probably want more than the 4 tuners you have with the basic.
> 
> Your above plan looks pretty good to me, though having a basic, Plus, and Pro in the same house might be a little overkill, but again that would depend on how many people live with you and how many tuners you could possibly need at any one time.


Three people. Me, wife and child. I know I would need more than 4 tuners so I would either add a Pro or Plus. I'll probably keep the cable company box for the ondemand stuff until I can convince the better half that netflix can take care of those needs. Think I might pick up one mini to see how it works and then decided on more mini's and/or pro/plus.

Then I am looking at MoCA so that should be fun.. Hoping it works as advertised as that will make my life a little easier. (Don't feel like wall fishing new drops right now  )


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## NYHeel (Oct 7, 2003)

chachster said:


> Three people. Me, wife and child. I know I would need more than 4 tuners so I would either add a Pro or Plus. I'll probably keep the cable company box for the ondemand stuff until I can convince the better half that netflix can take care of those needs. Think I might pick up one mini to see how it works and then decided on more mini's and/or pro/plus.
> 
> Then I am looking at MoCA so that should be fun.. Hoping it works as advertised as that will make my life a little easier. (Don't feel like wall fishing new drops right now  )


That's a lot of TVs for three people. It seems like one Roamio Pro would be enough with Minis for the rest of the TVs. With only 3 of you you're probably not going to be recording more than 6 shows at a time and the Pro has the large hard drive and the streaming built in.

On a side note, why do you have so many TVs? Remember you can always use a tablet to watch TV with streaming. But even without that, you have a TV to person ratio of 2 to 1. That seems insane. I have 2 TVs in my house for 5 people. Not criticizing just wondering why. Is that the norm here?


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## jwbelcher (Nov 13, 2007)

NYHeel said:


> That's a lot of TVs for three people. It seems like one Roamio Pro would be enough with Minis for the rest of the TVs. With only 3 of you you're probably not going to be recording more than 6 shows at a time and the Pro has the large hard drive and the streaming built in.
> 
> On a side note, why do you have so many TVs? Remember you can always use a tablet to watch TV with streaming. But even without that, you have a TV to person ratio of 2 to 1. That seems insane. I have 2 TVs in my house for 5 people. Not criticizing just wondering why. Is that the norm here?


As the thread is titled TiVo Fever! Joking aside, we have a Mini per room (office, workout room, nursery, bedrooms, etc). So we're also out numbered by TVs too, but depending where we're at, its nice having DVR access w/o tying our hands up with an ipad.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

chachster said:


> Three people. Me, wife and child. I know I would need more than 4 tuners so I would either add a Pro or Plus. I'll probably keep the cable company box for the ondemand stuff until I can convince the better half that netflix can take care of those needs. Think I might pick up one mini to see how it works and then decided on more mini's and/or pro/plus.
> 
> Then I am looking at MoCA so that should be fun.. Hoping it works as advertised as that will make my life a little easier. (Don't feel like wall fishing new drops right now  )


As long as you don't have any issues with your coax feeds or splitters, MoCA should work fine. Whether using MoCA or Ethernet, you will not notice a difference. At least from a users perspective.


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## eboydog (Mar 24, 2006)

Glad to see you are pleased! With multiple Roamio's, what you might encounter is the recordings that can't be transfered due to copy restrictions and multiple Mini's might be better as you won't need cable cards. 

My situation was that with the 4 tuner Roamio, I needed more tuners to handle the Mini's as too many times, the 4 tuner Roamio had 3 tuners tied to the Mini's with only one left to use so I tried a second Roamio basic and the issue I found then was some recordings were on one Roamio and I would need to change the Mini to a different one so I went with the Roamio Pro because while finding and recordings on multiple TiVo's wasn't difficult for me, the wife really didn't like the hassle of figuring it all out. 

Another thing too, I have an extra Mini that mobile somewhat as I keep it at my desk to watch TV there, the wife steals it times to time to watch TV in the kitchen. I could buy another Mini but I'm too cheap and the cost of another Mini and it's service is more than the hassle of moving it. 

MoCA woks well as long as your coax cabling is setup right, most of the time it works fine esp with the Mini, ethernet imo is better but of course having cat5 wiring can be a problem. My son's room is connected by Moca, I use a moca router setup as a gateway which allows him to have three ethernet connections for the Premiere, Xbox and PC he has in his room which works fine. For MoCA to work well, I would recommend tracing all your coax wiring and making sure there aren't any low frequency splitters (900mhz analog) or weird runs such as one room being fed by a splitter which is fed by a another splitter. The preferred manner is have every room connected by a coax run back to a central location with the only splitter being the one that splits the main service cable to the house. Also, with the poe filter at the entrance of service, you might need one on the coax servicing your cable modem, some cable modems have a built in filter such as the Surfboard 6141 but the Moca signal can mess up your CM. Also, if you do need splitters be sure to use ones that are certified for at least 1ghz or higher. 

The added benefit of the Plus & Pro is they have Moca built in including Stream. I'm using my new Pro to bridge my ethernet into my coax however I have seen some issues whiles transfering recordings to the pro which causes everything to bog down on the pro which in turn creates problems with the Mini's connecting, until Tivo fixes that bug I may switch back to using a dedicated Actiontec moca adapter to be the bridge instead of the pro but now I have primarily a single Roamio for the majority of my recorded content, this wasn't a big of issue as it once was. I have yet to test PC transfers to the Pro so such might remain a problem. 

The multi-tune Roamio TiVo's are addicting, I remember when the first dual tuner came out which was totally cool. If back then if someone would have asked if you need six tuners, you would have considered them nuts!


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## chachster (Dec 29, 2003)

We enjoy the flexibility of being able to watch in different rooms. As for needing more than 6 tuners... never know. I know we record a lot of Nick Jr stuff for our daughter and the wife is a reality TV junkie and records all types of those shows. Also having Netflix built it will be nice as we were switching from one device to another to get to netflix and then back.

Now I just need to get Roamio to see my cablecard and then I will feel better. I'm thinking of maybe starting with one mini to see how it works and then pull the trigger on a Pro and a few more. Or should I just go all in get the Pro and 4 mini's?

Does a mini connected use a tuner even if not being used?

Sorry for my dumb questions.. I am concerned about that which is why I was thinking a pro and a plus.

Darnit Eboydog, I am already looking at expansion and the Roamio I got from you isn't even fully working yet!


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## DeltaOne (Sep 29, 2013)

chachster said:


> Does a mini connected use a tuner even if not being used?


The Mini will release the tuner after four hours or if a Roamio needs it for a recording.

Or take the Mini to TiVo Central and the tuner is released immediately.

I've gotten in to the habit of going to TiVo Central before powering down a TV set that uses a Mini. I don't like seeing "in use by another TiVo" when in fact that TV set is off.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

NYHeel said:


> That's a lot of TVs for three people. It seems like one Roamio Pro would be enough with Minis for the rest of the TVs. With only 3 of you you're probably not going to be recording more than 6 shows at a time and the Pro has the large hard drive and the streaming built in.
> 
> On a side note, why do you have so many TVs? Remember you can always use a tablet to watch TV with streaming. But even without that, you have a TV to person ratio of 2 to 1. That seems insane. I have 2 TVs in my house for 5 people. Not criticizing just wondering why. Is that the norm here?


There are three people in our house and we have 6 TVs. One in each bedroom (all Minis), one in the Kitchen (also a Mini), one in the family room (Roamio Pro) and one in the basement rec room (our other Pro). On Sunday evenings we have 6 tuners recording at one point...3 on each Roamio.

(The fifth Mini drives a Slingbox for my daughter, who is away at school.)


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## Lrscpa (Apr 20, 2003)

One thing to keep in mind with the Minis is that without the ability to reserve a tuner for the Mini, as much as six tuners appear to be overkill, I have had situations where the Mini couldn't tune a channel due to all six tuners being used by the Roamio. More likely than one would think to have three or four scheduled recordings simultaneously, along with either two or three TiVo Suggestions. 

At that point the Mini is left out in the cold...


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## FitzAusTex (May 7, 2014)

Will the mini at least tune to one of the six? And if so can you control (rewind) without impacting what the other tivo/mini is doing? Pretty sure Dish Joeys (similar to minis) can tune to one of the in-use tuners, not that I expect tivos necessarily can.


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