# Add tuners to OTA Tivo



## Brewster411 (Jul 3, 2017)

I run into conflicts even with my OTA TiVo: would like the option to have 6 to 8 tuners.


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## Sparky1234 (May 8, 2006)

I'd like 12 tuners and 20TB storage.


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## shwru980r (Jun 22, 2008)

Brewster411 said:


> I run into conflicts even with my OTA TiVo: would like the option to have 6 to 8 tuners.


Buy another Tivo.


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## bella92108 (Apr 6, 2011)

Brewster411 said:


> I run into conflicts even with my OTA TiVo: would like the option to have 6 to 8 tuners.


I'm confused here... TiVo OTA can record FOUR shows at once. In any local market, there are generally ABC\CBS\NBC\FOX\CW affiliates. The whole sell for people to have the OTA is that they're not really TV people to justify a cable subscription, more streaming content users.

I have 250+ channels and I rarely find a time when my TiVo is recording 4 things at once, there's just not many instances where there's more than one or two interesting thing on at a time. Sounds like if you're running up against a wall on this issue, you might be in the wrong product category. I think you'll be hard-pressed to find people who just have an antenna and those 6 channels saying "gosh I wish I could record everything on every channel, there's just too much to watch" lol


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## Brewster411 (Jul 3, 2017)

I receive up to 64 channels from 22 over-the-air stations from my location including some movie channels. Also I hope some day USA, SiFi. TBS. FX & TNT will broadcast under one of these stations. I think they can broadcast up-to 9 or 10 channels under each station. If you go to Address and put in 32817 you will see how many line of site stations I can receive. I usually record a whole season before I watch them at the end of the season.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

Brewster411 said:


> I receive up to 64 channels from 22 over-the-air stations from my location including some movie channels.





Brewster411 said:


> Also I hope some day USA, SiFi. TBS. FX & TNT will broadcast under one of these stations.


Not gonna happen.


Brewster411 said:


> I think they can broadcast up-to 9 or 10 channels under each station.


Only so my much bandwidth available on a frequency. Most of the sub-channels are low quality.


Brewster411 said:


> If you go to Address and put in 32817 you will see how many line of site stations I can receive. I usually record a whole season before I watch them at the end of the season.


Your only option is to buy more TiVos.

As far as 4-tuners being enough, even if you disregard the sub-channels, padding eats up tuners vary quickly. Not to mention that in a household with multiple people with vastly different tastes, conflicts can arise even with no padding.


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## bella92108 (Apr 6, 2011)

Brewster411 said:


> I receive up to 64 channels from 22 over-the-air stations from my location including some movie channels. Also I hope some day USA, SiFi. TBS. FX & TNT will broadcast under one of these stations. I think they can broadcast up-to 9 or 10 channels under each station. If you go to Address and put in 32817 you will see how many line of site stations I can receive. I usually record a whole season before I watch them at the end of the season.


I remember one time attaching an antenna and doing a scan and about 40 or so channels came up. Absolutely ZERO of interest though. I guess if you want a chinese news channel or a mexican 24\7 music channel great, but I can't imagine recording things off these channels. The only things I'd record off of are the primary networks, and they purposely design their lineups so there's never more than 1-3 top-rated shows competing in a time slot. I was just looking at my fall tivo lineup, and even in the popular tue-thur 7 to 11 pm timeslots, across all my channels including cable i could only see 1 or 2 instances where 4 shows were recording at once.

I guess you just like to record everything, even the garbage that uninteresting... seems silly... but then so does only having 4 real channels to chose from because you use an antenna.


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## bella92108 (Apr 6, 2011)

lpwcomp said:


> As far as 4-tuners being enough, even if you disregard the sub-channels, padding eats up tuners vary quickly. Not to mention that in a household with multiple people with vastly different tastes, conflicts can arise even with no padding.


So he wants cable channels (the 5 or 6 people pay their entire cable bill of 200+ just to get those few channels for) to go free over the air? BAHAHHAHA... I think the 46 of 50 channels he gets being foreign languages and home shopping channels have him confused how it works.

I disagree, 4 tuners being enough when you get 4 actual channels on an antenna and 45 sub channels with absolutely NOTHING on... gosh, I can't even imagine maxing out the tuners, especially when the OTA boxes have such small recording capacity. just seems so boring to have such a nice box\tivo and hook it up to an antenna, haha


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

Ignorance and arrogance. A deadly combination.


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## Brewster411 (Jul 3, 2017)

lpwcomp said:


> Not gonna happen.Only so my much bandwidth available on a frequency. Most of the sub-channels are low quality.Your only option is to buy more TiVos.
> 
> As far as 4-tuners being enough, even if you disregard the sub-channels, padding eats up tuners vary quickly. Not to mention that in a household with multiple people with vastly different tastes, conflicts can arise even with no padding.


Yes this is where I have the problem, I have to pad during football & basketball season. And since I like to record the whole season before watching it I don't always see the 10 o'clock padded show that gets moved to 9 o'clock. I currently have a 3 TB drive in my TiVo and still have to archive a lot of shows to external drives. This also causes a problem when I retrieve them back to the TiVo, I loose the [Skip] feature. If I get another TiVo I need an additional subscription (for $14.95) which defeats the the cost saving of going OTA. 
So in closing; I would still like TiVo to give me the option of purchasing more tuners & being able to archive recordings to an external USB hard drive.


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## Mikeguy (Jul 28, 2005)

bella92108 said:


> I'm confused here... TiVo OTA can record FOUR shows at once. In any local market, there are generally ABC\CBS\NBC\FOX\CW affiliates. The whole sell for people to have the OTA is that they're not really TV people to justify a cable subscription, more streaming content users.
> 
> I have 250+ channels and I rarely find a time when my TiVo is recording 4 things at once, there's just not many instances where there's more than one or two interesting thing on at a time. Sounds like if you're running up against a wall on this issue, you might be in the wrong product category. I think you'll be hard-pressed to find people who just have an antenna and those 6 channels saying "gosh I wish I could record everything on every channel, there's just too much to watch" lol


Although not the rule, there have been (fortunate) times when all the tuners in my Roamio OTA are recording and I could use 2 more: a couple broadcast channels, a couple PBS stations (I have 5), a SciFi classics station, and a film classics station; etc. It happens.


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## HerronScott (Jan 1, 2002)

Brewster411 said:


> So in closing; I would still like TiVo to give me the option of purchasing more tuners & being able to archive recordings to an external USB hard drive.


You know that you can already download the shows to your PC with several tools (and archive to an external USB drive connected to your PC) and upload them back later if needed?

Scott


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

HerronScott said:


> You know that you can already download the shows to your PC with several tools (and archive to an external USB drive connected to your PC) and upload them back later if needed?
> 
> Scott


He knows.



Brewster411 said:


> <snip> I currently have a 3 TB drive in my TiVo and still have to archive a lot of shows to external drives. This also causes a problem when I retrieve them back to the TiVo, I loose the [Skip] feature.<snip>


The best option would be to edit our the commercials of the archived shows. Then you don't *need* skip mode.



Brewster411 said:


> So in closing; I would still like TiVo to give me the option of purchasing more tuners & being able to archive recordings to an external USB hard drive.


Neither one is really doable.


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## Sparky1234 (May 8, 2006)

HerronScott said:


> You know that you can already download the shows to your PC with several tools (and archive to an external USB drive connected to your PC) and upload them back later if needed?
> 
> Scott


pytivo comes to mind...


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## bella92108 (Apr 6, 2011)

Mikeguy said:


> Although not the rule, there have been (fortunate) times when all the tuners in my Roamio OTA are recording and I could use 2 more: a couple broadcast channels, a couple PBS stations (I have 5), a SciFi classics station, and a film classics station; etc. It happens.


Odd. I just couldn't imagine being stuck with the garbage of sub channels. The first time I flipped through sub channels I chuckled cause it was literally such a joke and I've lived in markets big and small. They're all junk.


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## Mikeguy (Jul 28, 2005)

bella92108 said:


> Odd. I just couldn't imagine being stuck with the garbage of sub channels. The first time I flipped through sub channels I chuckled cause it was literally such a joke and I've lived in markets big and small. They're all junk.


Of course, some/many are (at least for me)--I ignore those. But as I mentioned, a film classics channel has been great (providing an in-house equivalent to my local library branch's DVD collection), along with a SciFi, etc. channel, and all those for PBS. Plus a few running earlier broadcast TV series that I hadn't seen before.


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## shooter33 (May 9, 2018)

Hey all- Thought I'd unbury this relic of a thread for a bit...has anyone been able to accomplish this? I don't care what anyone thinks of OTA sub-channels, programming, and why anyone would need or want to record more channels at once, etc. Can something like this- https://www.amazon.com/Hauppauge-Wi...8&qid=1534171029&sr=8-4&keywords=tv+usb+tuner or something similar be used to add any additional tuners to the Tivo OTA? And yes- I already realize I'd have to split my coax to feed both coax inputs...A couple extra tuners, a beefier hard drive, and a bracket added for a cable card for the cable folks would really expand the possibilities of the OTA w/o the monthly cost that accompanies the Bolt VOX. The Tivo OTA VOX is great on it's own, but mods are always welcome. Hell, if I could hack a way to put more apps on the thing, I'd be all for that. It's severely lacking there. For now, extra tuners- anyone??


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## LarryAtHome (Feb 18, 2008)

Brewster411 said:


> If I get another TiVo I need an additional subscription (for $14.95) which defeats the the cost saving of going OTA.


The Roamio OTA now comes with a subscription. No need to pay per month. You may be better off getting rid of your subscription one and switch to the Roamio OTA as there are no monthly fees.

Most of the sub channels repeat their programming over and over. In most cases, if you can not record it at one time, it will be played again very soon.


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## OrangeCrush (Feb 18, 2016)

shooter33 said:


> Can something like this- https://www.amazon.com/Hauppauge-Wi...8&qid=1534171029&sr=8-4&keywords=tv+usb+tuner or something similar be used to add any additional tuners to the Tivo OTA?


The tuners aren't upgradeable or expandable.  You're stuck with what's built in to the box. It would be nice to have more, but it doesn't look like that's in the cards. Best you can do is buy a second Roamio OTA, which will give you another box with 4 more tuners. Unfortunately, they won't act like a single box with 8 tuners. They can see each other's recordings, but they don't synchronize or coordinate schedules, tuners or anything like that.

Other options to consider are DIY & alternative DVRs like Plex, Tablo & HDHomeRun. There's also Hulu, which has nothing to do with tuners, but major shows from ABC, NBC & Fox usually show up the next day for streaming on demand, to reduce your reliance on recordings.


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## Value4Realty (Oct 20, 2018)

Brewster411 said:


> I run into conflicts even with my OTA TiVo: would like the option to have 6 to 8 tuners.


Totally with you. Five of us can easily be on at once. Wish they had the 6 room, 3TB model working with OTA reception instead of just Cable.

Would also be nice to see more downloadable service like an android player has


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## warrenn (Jun 24, 2004)

OrangeCrush said:


> Best you can do is buy a second Roamio OTA, which will give you another box with 4 more tuners. Unfortunately, they won't act like a single box with 8 tuners. They can see each other's recordings, but they don't synchronize or coordinate schedules, tuners or anything like that.


That would be a useful feature if multiple Tivo's could act like a mesh and schedule recordings on whichever Tivo had an available tuner.

Although in theory I'd like Tivos to have more tuners, I'm not sure it's worth the extra cost those tuners would add. For most people, 4 tuners are sufficient. Adding more tuners would add to the price, which may mean fewer people buying Tivos.

Are all the people slamming OTA subchannel content younger than 40? I have several season passes for classic shows from the 80's like Miami Vice, Columbo, Wonder Woman (think you Tivo for slow mo ) and others.


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## TonyD79 (Jan 4, 2002)

Since they don’t mesh, most people assign certain networks to each TiVo, mitigating most conflicts and just manage those few times that that technique doesn’t work.


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## OrangeCrush (Feb 18, 2016)

warrenn said:


> Are all the people slamming OTA subchannel content younger than 40?


Nah, I'm under 40 and love the old shows on the sub-channels!

Just upgrade the hard drive and hoard everything you could possibly want to watch. That'll free up some tuners!


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## Brian W (Jun 24, 2020)

I also would like to see Atleast 8 tuners in each Tivo. The problem I’ve been noticing is four tuners is really only good as two. Many OTA shows do not Perfectly conform to time slots. Since shows require that you begin recording 2 mins early and stop a few mins late, often times you cannot record more than two shows at once because if one show starts immediately after the previous one on the same channel, now you need two tuners for one station. I know some might say to simply record manually or extend the first recording by an out to fix this problem. If I do that then I lose the ability to Indra my shows properly and the skip commercial features won’t work on the second show. The simplest fix is to add extra tuners.


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