# Is the cachecard TiVo specific?



## Dazbear (Aug 24, 2001)

I am thinking of upgrading my TiVo but looking at the likes of TiVoHeaven it seems costly.

£79 for the cachecard and £89 for the drive. I am wary of spending too much as it seems that HomeChoice (my provider) may be providing a PVR some time in the New Year as part of its new package.

I can get the exactly the same drive for £15 new from a high street store! Now wondering about the cachecard. Is it TiVo specific or is it generally a network card?

Any help?

D


----------



## Tony Hoyle (Apr 1, 2002)

£15 for a hard drive? Cheapest I've seen 160gb seagate drives is a bit less than £40, so snap it up if you can get it (and let us know where is selling them that cheap!).

Tivoheaven also install the software on the drive for you, and of course guarantee it, which saves you a bit of work.

The cachecard is Tivo specific.


----------



## Mike B (Sep 16, 2003)

Dazbear said:


> I can get the exactly the same drive for £15 new from a high street store!


Are you saying that you can get a brand new 160GB HDD with TiVo software pre-installed (so its ready to just put into your TiVo) from a high-street shop for £15. Sorry, but I don't think so.



Dazbear said:


> Now wondering about the cachecard. Is it TiVo specific or is it generally a network card?


The cachecard has a special connector so you cannot use a normal network card. Also, the cachecard has a DIMM slot, so can be fitted with memory to cache the TiVo database and speed up the viewing of the Now Playing list, re-ordering of Season Passes etc


----------



## Dazbear (Aug 24, 2001)

....not with software pre-installed, although with TiVoLand you have to pay extra for this anyhow! To install it myself with Hooch would only cost £24 extra.

I typed Seagate 7200 in Pricerunner to compare prices.

Having the software pre-installed and the work guaranteed may be worth the extra though.


----------



## Tony Hoyle (Apr 1, 2002)

That £15 one is bogus. It turns out to be a ST31270A which is 1.2GB drive.

That'll give you about 2 minutes in mode 0 

The cheapest 160GB 7200.9 pricerunner have is £35 from dabs (£41 inc delivery).


----------



## Fred Smith (Oct 5, 2002)

Dazbear said:


> I typed Seagate 7200 in Pricerunner to compare prices.


So did I. Came up with a 1.2Gb 4500RPM Seagate  . Bit small for TiVo. 

A bare 160Gb came up at around £45.


----------



## Dazbear (Aug 24, 2001)

Yeah now I have looked further! The ad does say for 160gb but when you click through......maybe a mistake, will let PriceRunner know!

Thanks guys..


----------



## Dazbear (Aug 24, 2001)

Ok, looking at this item on Ebay

WIRELESS NETWORK ADAPTOR CARD WITH LINKSYS WIRELESS CARD

It says "comes with drivers". Would I need TiVoweb installed onto the HDD to get this to work. Does that require me to take the HDD out of the TiVo or is there another way of installing?

Have asked the seller, but no response as of yet.


----------



## Tony Hoyle (Apr 1, 2002)

That looks like one of the old aironet cards. Could be a good deal.

For wireless with cachecard you need to attach a game adapter, eg. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Linksys-WGA54G-Wireless-G-Game-Adapter/dp/B0000DG4WG


----------



## Dazbear (Aug 24, 2001)

oh right - will it not work with my Linksys wireless adaptor that I currently for broadband etc?


----------



## Tony Hoyle (Apr 1, 2002)

The cachecard just has an ethernet interface. If you can get a cable to it, then it'll plug into anything.. but then you're not connecting wirelessly.

The aironet doesn't need anything extra as it's a wireless card. Don't see them around much any more... most people seem to go for the cachecard instead.


----------



## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Dazbear said:


> I am wary of spending too much as it seems that HomeChoice (my provider) may be providing a PVR some time in the New Year as part of its new package.


With all due respect to HomeChoice, I kind of doubt whether its upcoming 'PVR' will be much good compared to a TiVo 


Dazbear said:


> Ok, looking at this item on Ebay [...]
> It says "comes with drivers". Would I need TiVoweb installed onto the HDD to get this to work. Does that require me to take the HDD out of the TiVo or is there another way of installing?


This is an Airnet card which has a number of disadvantages compared to a cachecard - a) it's SLOW, always limited to 11mbps by the 802.11b wireless card which can't be upgraded and b) the wireless card will have a limited range as it has to work from _inside_ the TiVo's metal case. This is OK where your router/AP is pretty close, but in that scenario you could probably run a wire instead and get 100mbps.

Yes, you normally need to install the (airnet or cachecard) drivers using a CD in your PC. TiVoWeb is not required to access your TiVo via the network (that's what the network drivers are for) but is a useful application that allows you to control your TiVo from your PC. However, if you use Hooch to configure the drive, all the required drivers (for cachecard, not airnet) plus TiVoWeb will be pre-installed.


----------



## Dazbear (Aug 24, 2001)

Thanks for all your help! Its more complicated than I thought! (hehe)

I agree that any PVR from HC wont be up to TiVo standards, but having a 2nd PVR with the capacity to record 2 items at once would probably would mean I wouldnt upgrade TiVo.


----------



## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Dazbear said:


> Thanks for all your help! Its more complicated than I thought! (hehe)
> 
> I agree that any PVR from HC wont be up to TiVo standards, but having a 2nd PVR with the capacity to record 2 items at once would probably would mean I wouldnt upgrade TiVo.


It will probably be like having two Skodas rather than one BMW.


----------



## Dazbear (Aug 24, 2001)

hmmmm - so if I went for the older tech of the Airnet - how slow is slow in real terms? And what is slow? The updates via the broadband, interface with the PC - or general running of the TiVo menus?

Sorry to sound so thick about it all!


----------



## mikerr (Jun 2, 2005)

blindlemon said:


> This is an Airnet card which has a number of disadvantages compared to a cachecard - a) it's SLOW, always limited to 11mbps by the 802.11b wireless card


That is no real disadvantage as the ONLY thing you'll ever need more transfer speed for is extracting or streaming video (which we can't talk about here).

Cachecard does have the big advantage in that it speeds up a slow tivo
by caching the database in ram, which makes a real difference when you have a larger disk/ more recordings and season passes.

It used to take 10-20 seconds to open now-playing list, with cachecard its 1 second or less...

Rearranging season passes with 25 SP's took 10 minutes to complete with cachecard and 512MB ram it took around 30 seconds!


----------



## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Just to concur with mikerr if you are going to only install a 120Gb disk and record everything at Best then the Airnet card will be fine but if you are going to install a 400Gb disk then even recording everything at Best with an Airnet card you are going to see quite a slow down in Now Playing menu speeds etc. The Cachecard can accept a 512MB PC 133 SDRAM DIMM which can hold the Tivo database and so speed up many menu data access requests.

However in terms of network access with the outisde world the Cachecard can only dispense data to the outside world at about 1.7 Meg (the main constraint being the speed of the Tivo processor chip) which is way below the 10 Meg capabilities of 811b which the Airnet uses so for removing data from the Tivo by whatever means as some people apparently do the Airnet card would not give you a slow down compared to a Cachecard.

It all comes down to whether you plan to install a big hard drive like the 400Gb Samsung that only costs £81 delivered from www.komplett.co.uk while you are going through the whole upgrade process, rather than only installing only a tiddler like a 160Gb drive when you still have to do the same amount of work.


----------



## Dazbear (Aug 24, 2001)

hmmm I have over 200 season passes! Maybe I need a cache card then!

It all gets a bit expensive - HDD, Cachcard, RAM and then lifetime sub works out over £400! grrr


----------



## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

It all comes down to your budget really and how much you hate seeing the words "Insufficient Disk Space" which you may perhaps never see again if you go for a 400Gb Samsung drive, or even two of them? 

Also compared to what Sky etc charge on an annual basis for their services then a couple of hundred quid upgrading a Tivo to a far more capable machine is really a very modest investment.

See some of these websites on all the stuff you can do with a networked Tivo and also how to upgrade yourself:-

www.steveconrad.co.uk/tivo

http://tivo.lightn.org/

www.ljay.org.uk/tivoweb/

www.garysargent.co.uk/tivo/hacking.htm

www.beaconhill.plus.com/TiVo/tivohacks.htm

http://www.arielbusiness.pwp.blueyo.../TiVo/HowTo.htm

http://alt.org/wiki/index.php/TiVoWeb Modules

http://thomson.tivo.googlepages.com

http://tivo.stevejenkins.com/network_cd.html

http://thomson.tivo.googlepages.com/tivowebplus

http://widgets.yahoo.com/gallery/?search=oztivo&x=0&y=0

www.tivohackman.com


----------



## Dazbear (Aug 24, 2001)

I am thinking an upgrade to around 200GB, hmmm - decisions, decisions!

Thanks for all of your help guys!


----------



## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Dazbear said:


> I am thinking an upgrade to around 200GB, hmmm - decisions, decisions!
> 
> Thanks for all of your help guys!


The cheapest but also the hardest way is to buy the Cachecard on Ebay, the memory for the Cachecard from Ebuyer and the hard drive from the cheapest supplier for the size you want.

If you are going for only a 200Gb hard drive then you can probably get the drive and the Cachecard and the memory for about £155 in total but clearly you will have to feel confident to follow all the instructions at www.steveconrad.co.uk/tivo using your own desktop PC to format the drives and install the Cachecard drivers etc. However help is usually available on here if you get stuck and as a worst case you could always send the drive to TivoHeaven and pay the £50 or so for their bare drive Tivo formatting and TivoWeb and Cachecard driver installation service - this is quite a lot cheaper than buying one of TivoHeaven's off the shelf one year guaranteed drive packages.

However if I was you I would go for the 400Gb Samsung drive while I was at it as its only another £30 extra and still only about 137 hours recording time at Best quality. A 200Gb drive would be only about 65 hours if all recorded at Best.


----------



## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Ebuyer sell a 10 metre network cable for about 2 quid if you have an easy way to connect your Tivo's Cachecard and your wireless router without bothering with all the wireless stuff.


----------



## Dazbear (Aug 24, 2001)

That AirNet card went for £67 in the end on Ebay. Was willing to bid £20 (hehe).

Will probably go for a cachecard now.


----------



## sanderton (Jan 4, 2002)

Pete77 said:


> However in terms of network access with the outisde world the Cachecard can only dispense data to the outside world at about 1.7 Meg (the main constraint being the speed of the Tivo processor chip) which is way below the 10 Meg capabilities of 811b which the Airnet uses so for removing data from the Tivo by whatever means as some people apparently do the Airnet card would not give you a slow down compared to a Cachecard.


Good theory, but not what you see in practice. In fact even with a 802.11g wireless connection with a wireless bridge you see a significant speed degradation compared to pure ethernet. Wireless never gets anywhere near its declared spec, and a lot of the data tranferred seems to be a wireless overhead.

You can do better than 1.7mB/s with fine tuning. Mine was pushing 3 the other day, although 2.4 is more normal.


----------



## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Dazbear said:


> That AirNet card went for £67 in the end on Ebay. Was willing to bid £20 (hehe).
> 
> Will probably go for a cachecard now.


The Buy It Now price of a Cachecard on Ebay is only 7 quid higher than that. However I see that being Christmas the usual seller hasn't got any on offer this week.

You can also buy them direct from www.9thtee.com/tivoupgrades.htm but then you play Russian Roulette as to whether you get hit with customs duty or not. Rumour has it that 9th Tee declares their value in such a way that customs doesn't normally charge import duty.


----------



## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

sanderton said:


> Good theory, but not what you see in practice. In fact even with a 802.11g wireless connection with a wireless bridge you see a significant speed degradation compared to pure ethernet. Wireless never gets anywhere near its declared spec, and a lot of the data tranferred seems to be a wireless overhead.
> 
> You can do better than 1.7mB/s with fine tuning. Mine was pushing 3 the other day, although 2.4 is more normal.


My setup is wired between the Cachecard/Tivo and the Netgear DG834G ADSL wireless router but wireless between the router and my Notebook PC. So are you saying if I plugged my Notebook PC into the router to talk Tango Yankee Sierra * * * * Romeo on the Tivo one might in theory be able to transport televisual feasts more rapidly? I certainly find under my current setup things start off quoted at 2.0mB/s but have fallen to only 1.7mB/s after say 20MB has been transferred.

I suspect having wireless between the Tivo and the router does cause more speed loss because it may involve further stress and work on the poor little Tivo brain. However wireless between the router and my Notebook PC probably takes any Tivo limitations out of the loop.

I believe a gentleman across the pond who takes his name from chocolate biscuits with an orange filling was working on a Burst mode to accelerate transfer from the Tivo but sadly it never seemed to get anywhere in terms of real world use.


----------

