# No video signal



## Mr. Spicoli (Oct 15, 2006)

For starters Id like to fill you in on my set up; I have DirecTV and a stand alone Series 2 Tivo box. From time to time the satellite receiver accidentally gets turned off either by me or my wife and, of course, my Tivo box will not record any shows because of no video signal to the Tivo box. I was wondering since the Tivo box sees that it isnt getting a video signal that if it would be possible to have it try to turn on the satellite box? It already knows the codes to change the channels on the satellite box why not attempt to turn it on when there isnt a video signal?



Thanks in advance,

Jeff.


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## omni555 (Oct 4, 2006)

Excellent question there! I was wondering the same thing about my cable STB. When a power outage occurs the cable box is powered off and needs to be restarted manually. This means that if it happens during the night or when no one is home, shows scheduled to record (at least from digital channels) will not be recorded.

It would be great if there were some way that TiVo could use its detection of the no-signal condition to initiate a power-on of the cable box.


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## Stylin (Dec 31, 2004)

I do not know about satellite, but I know this function exists with some cable boxes. It is actually the cable box that enables the feature not tivo. My cable box (Sci Atl 4200) is set to power on everytime there is a channel change.
On mine I go into "SETTINGS" and then "MORE" then dial through the options to "SET: POWER-ON KEYS" and choose "POWER AND NUMERIC"
Works great if your box reboots or powers off when you are not home.

I *think* the SA boxes all have this feature - not sure about others...


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## kwelty (Feb 14, 2002)

Since TiVo is intelligent enough to understand that there is no video signal coming in, it should be able to do the following IF TiVo cared enough to do so:
1. Before a show recording begins, check the state of the active video signal.
2. If no active signal is detected, send a "Power On" signal to the cable box.
3. If no video signal is detected, wait 15 seconds and try two additional times from step 2.
4. Give up if no video signal is still available.

The only reason I can think of that they dont do this is that they do not have programmed into the TiVo the Power button feature. They may have to update the remote control database to commodate it.

I have frequently returned form trips and found that the cable box has powered down and I have lost days of programming. If the mechanism for detecting a video signal could be isolated form the rest of the TiVo code, then it might be as easy as developing a daemon that checks the active signal state.

-kevin


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## mdfst13 (Mar 16, 2005)

kwelty said:


> The only reason I can think of that they dont do this is that they do not have programmed into the TiVo the Power button feature.


I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the problem is that the power on and off signals are the same on most boxes. If so, there would be increased vulnerability to hardware failure. I.e. if the cable signal detector breaks, they will turn off the cable box instead of turning it on.

Changing the cable box to automatically power up on channel change seems a more reliable method.

If they do add your idea, I hope they make it configurable.


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