# Unify multiple Tivo units



## ahwman (Jan 24, 2013)

After many years of being a loyal Windows Media Center user, I've finally had enough of the bad EPG data, irritating configuration errors, Windows updates and overall upkeep aside from the fact that Microsoft has abandoned any further development to WMC. That said, I've decided to take the plunge with two Premiere XL4's and lifetime service and am waiting to receive them. I'm confident I'll enjoy my TiVo experience, however there are a few things I think I'll miss and hope TiVo will add these obvious omissions in the near future...

With the advent of whole home DVR service, these seem like no-brainers:

 Dynamic tuner pooling (with my HTPC, I could easily add additional tuner cards and they would work together and be available for recording or to extenders on demand)

 A unified experience which pools all recorded TV, Season Passes, scheduled recordings, etc. from multiple TiVo's into one place instead of having to hunt for which TiVo contains what I'm looking for. Case in point, I'm not sure how I should break up and allocate scheduled recordings between the two units since they can't share tuners between each other to reduce scheduling conflicts. This could potentially overwhelm one, while the other is sitting idle - seems like a huge waist of resources...

In my opinion, these improvements would make for a much more robust whole home DVR experience.


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## bradleys (Oct 31, 2007)

Both ideas have been talked about a lot. For some reason TiVo has not implemented them - at least not yet.


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

In the mean time, here is how we handle it. We have 3 tivos.

Designate one of them as main unit. For us, its the one in the home theater as it is where we watch the most tv. All scheduling is done on that unit. About once a week I use kmttg to deteremine if there are any scheduling conflicts upcomming on that unit and easily move the extra recording to a secondary unit.

I also have kmttg set up to move the secondary recordings to the main unit shortly there after. All our tv's use the NPL on the main unit with the other essentially being clients and handleing overflow.

Will be nice when the tivo software does it for your but its not that bad.


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## ahwman (Jan 24, 2013)

jcthorne said:


> In the mean time, here is how we handle it. We have 3 tivos.
> 
> Designate one of them as main unit. For us, its the one in the home theater as it is where we watch the most tv. All scheduling is done on that unit. About once a week I use kmttg to deteremine if there are any scheduling conflicts upcomming on that unit and easily move the extra recording to a secondary unit.
> 
> ...


Thanks for your advice, this is exactly what I was thinking. I came from a 4 tuner setup and never had any scheduling conflicts, so I'm assuming the same will be true with TiVo and that one unit should be able to handle all of my recordings. I'm thinking I'll store all of my DVD's on the other to keep things tidy.

Being new to TiVo, can you enlighten me on the terms "NPL" and "KMTTG"?

Thanks again for your suggestions...


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## philhu (Apr 11, 2001)

jcthorne said:


> In the mean time, here is how we handle it. We have 3 tivos.
> 
> I also have kmttg set up to move the secondary recordings to the main unit shortly there after. All our tv's use the NPL on the main unit with the other essentially being clients and handleing overflow.


Interesting idea. How do you get KMTTG to move all items back to the primary tivo? I know it can run as a service and can download .tivo files, but how do you push them to the primary tivo? Do you still have to manually remove the moved shows from the slave Tivos? (I assume yes)

I have 3 tivos too. The primary has 4tb space (2+2) and the others each have 1.5tb, so that would be perfect.


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