# Brand new TiVo Edge and TiVo Minis and unable to connect or stream



## Kendall Bennett (Dec 21, 2019)

Hi Guys,

After nearly a decade away I finally decided to get a TiVo again (as the Xfinity X1 DVR I just got last week is terrible). I got the TiVo Edge DVR and threee Mini VOX devices. It took some serious work to get the stupid CableCard to work, but we finally got it sorted (for some reason the Data ID both myself and the rep originally put in, never took hold until Xfinity finally reprogrammed it again again).

Anyway long story short, got the TiVo DVR working and I love it. However none of my TiVo Mini VOX device will connect with the main DVR saying there is no compatible DVR found on the network. I get basically the same error when I try to connect my iPhone or iPad to the TiVo DVR for streaming (just says it failed, but same thing; it cannot stream). On the TiVo box when I look at the 'TiVo Boxes' section, there is an error V406 saying there 'is a problem with my account that might be preventing streaming' from my DVR.

I have been going insane with TiVo support all week doing mindless reboots and reconnects on the main DVR and my TiVo Minis, and reinstalling the iOS apps from scratch but nothing is working.

Anyone got any ideas on how to solve this? I am convinced the issue with something not configured correctly in my TiVo account, and because it was dormant for a decade I actually had TiVo create a brand new account for me and transfer all my devices into it, but it's still the same. Which leads me to believe the issue is not an issue with my account per-se, but the DVR devices linked into my account (some kind of configuration issue).

In this thread:

TiVo Mini & Roamio OTA DVR V70 Connection Problems

the poster said configuration is in their mini had to be changed, but I can't change anything on the mini as they won't get past the initial setup. Once I connect to TiVo and download all the data, then name my mini, it throws up the V70 error.

But what's odd is that the TiVo apps also do not work. TiVo kept thinking originally it was a networking issue, but I am 99% sure that's not the case, but you never know. I have my Comcast cable router set to bridge mode as I have my own WiFi via a Linksys MR8300 Mesh WiFi Router and multiple WiFi nodes in the house, but none of the TiVo devices are on WiFi. All my devices are hard wired using gigabit ethernet cabling going into a 24 port switch, which is then connected into the back of the MR8300 router. All the devices happily see the TiVo service and there is no firewall between any of them as they are all connected to the same physical switch. I even disabled the firewall on it via the admin interface to see if that would make any difference, but nada.

Today TiVo said they will replace the main DVR, but I am 99% convinced when it shows up it will have the same problem.

Any suggestions?


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## Kendall Bennett (Dec 21, 2019)

Here is a link to the account issue I see on the main DVR as a screen shot.








iCloud


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## draegs (Mar 29, 2010)

Did you ever get this working?


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## Kendall Bennett (Dec 21, 2019)

draegs said:


> Did you ever get this working?


No, the replacement edge is exactly the same as the first one. So I asked again if they could at least try flipping the i to an a but that has to go up the chain apparently and might take a week?

It is getting a bit ridiculous. About ready to ask for a full refund for everything and go back to the comcrap box and pay the monthly extortion fee for multi room viewing.

Their engineering folks are adamant that a,i,a,a is correct for the edge, but have no clue why this does not work with my account. Even though I have pointed them at multiple sources including their own web pages that say it should be a,a,a. I did verify that if I turn off all the streaming in my account and do a network connection it changes it i,i,i,a but turning it back on it goes back to a,i,a,a and iPad/iPhone streaming and the mini don't work.

I wish they would just change the damn permission so we can test that and move on. If changing to a,a,a,a does not fix it then I am done and back to Comcast. But who knows, maybe it would actually work??


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## krkaufman (Nov 25, 2003)

A full month from the original post. Depressing.


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## Kendall Bennett (Dec 21, 2019)

krkaufman said:


> A full month from the original post. Depressing.


What's worse, is when I pointed their support folks at this thread:

TiVo Mini & Roamio OTA DVR V70 Connection Problems

Their response was, but that thread is over a year old, which is odd, because it was started by someone else Dec 1, 2019? Not that long ago. I just have no clue how to get through to them that the general consensus on the internet when you research it, is that the second i in the TiVoToGo permissions will stop this from working. But they are convinced it is not that and after a month of pleading, refuse to even TRY changing it. It's ridiculous.

They also wave away the issue when I ask them, OK, so forget the Mini. I can't get my iPad or iPhone to stream either. How do we fix that (clearly, permissions, but who I am to tell them that?). Then they say the streaming issue for the Mini is not related to the streaming issue fore the iPad and iPhone, which is quite silly because they both use the same functionality.


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## krkaufman (Nov 25, 2003)

Kendall Bennett said:


> They also wave away the issue when I ask them, OK, so forget the Mini. I can't get my iPad or iPhone to stream either. How do we fix that (clearly, permissions, but who I am to tell them that?). Then they say the streaming issue for the Mini is not related to the streaming issue fore the iPad and iPhone, which is quite silly because they both use the same functionality.


Mini streaming and mobile streaming are different implementations, so they're right on that front ... but that doesn't mean that the different mechanisms don't reference the same device permissions flag.

p.s. One thing to try after they've finally tried tweaking the permissions setting would be creating a new TiVo account and transferring the devices over -- perhaps as a means of resetting the device profile on their side. (long shot; no evidence or experience that it would help)


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## Kendall Bennett (Dec 21, 2019)

krkaufman said:


> Mini streaming and mobile streaming are different implementations, so they're right on that front ... but that doesn't mean that the different mechanisms don't reference the same device permissions flag.


Right, totally different implementation but I am positive they refer to the same permissions flags to determine if it's allowed.



krkaufman said:


> p.s. One thing to try after they've finally tried tweaking the permissions setting would be creating a new TiVo account and transferring the devices over -- perhaps as a means of resetting the device profile on their side. (long shot; no evidence or experience that it would help)


Great minds think alike. Did that like three weeks ago when it was clear it was an account issue (as that's what the TiVo was saying on the TiVo Boxes screen). I was also suspicious as my old account was from 1998 or something and had not been used in a decade, and was still in some funky beta program from back then so my privacy settings could not be changed (kept saying I was on a beta program and could not change it). So I
had them create a whole new account, changed the email on my old account, transferred all the devices over to it, and no go.

Privacy settings went back to normal which was nice and it is no longer in the beta program, but it did not change the permissions nor get anything working.


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## Fugacity (Oct 1, 2004)

Yeah that sucks you are still having problems. However I'm am still an example of Tivo not being wrong on your permissions on the Edge of a,i,a,a will work with A95 minis. 2 minis 1 edge and everything works(since i set dhcp reservations, see Minis taking down my home LAN as to why this is a good idea in general)

The mini's need to be i,a,i,a for sure though, but yours are aren't they? If they aren't, they are totally getting confused in that the edge can/should be a,i,a,a but the mini's need to be i,a,i,a...

I'm about to try moca out soon to see if it will help with some of the freezing of the network switches but the new splitter is in the mail still.

My network is network extender, 12 port dumb switch, and router. I have never put the tivo off of the network extender, but the minis were out of the box sometimes slow to establish connection, like network connection on dvr, reboot mini, one or two network connections on the mini and things would generally work in that 30 minutes or so. I don't know if there was a problem with my minis ever not being i,a,i,a though. They are now.


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## Kendall Bennett (Dec 21, 2019)

Fugacity said:


> Yeah that sucks you are still having problems. However I'm am still an example of Tivo not being wrong on your permissions on the Edge of a,i,a,a will work with A95 minis. 2 minis 1 edge and everything works(since i set dhcp reservations, see Minis taking down my home LAN as to why this is a good idea in general)


Right, I am not convinced that changing it to a,a,a,a will work either. I just want to try it. I have also tried using static IP's for the devices as that is how I actually have them all set up now. All the TiVo devices are static so no DHCP is used anymore at all.



Fugacity said:


> The mini's need to be i,a,i,a for sure though, but yours are aren't they? If they aren't, they are totally getting confused in that the edge can/should be a,i,a,a but the mini's need to be i,a,i,a...


That's the rub. The mini won't get past the initial setup screen, so you can't even get to the settings to see what the permissions are set to. If the permissions on the main TiVo box is not the problem (which is entirely possible), then it's something else wrong in my account and nobody knows what. Which is even more odd because we created a whole new account and transferred the TiVo Edge over to it. Almost makes me think it *was* something whacky in my old legacy account from yesteryear, but somehow whatever is jacked up got transferred to the new account along with the device once we registered it into the new account. Because it was already messed up from having been attached to the old account.

But I have also done a full factory reset on the Edge after I changed accounts, thinking maybe that was it and it did not fix anything.



Fugacity said:


> I'm about to try moca out soon to see if it will help with some of the freezing of the network switches but the new splitter is in the mail still.


I have the Moca device from my old DirecTV install floating around, and Comcast is supposed to support it out of the box with their routers (but then I have to enable their WiFi which I do not want to do). I have considered trying to set up Moca myself to see if maybe that would fix it.

But then I still can't work out why the iPhone and iPad don't work either. It's all somehow related.



Fugacity said:


> My network is network extender, 12 port dumb switch, and router. I have never put the tivo off of the network extender, but the minis were out of the box sometimes slow to establish connection, like network connection on dvr, reboot mini, one or two network connections on the mini and things would generally work in that 30 minutes or so. I don't know if there was a problem with my minis ever not being i,a,i,a though. They are now.


My network is comcast cable modem (in bridge mode), attached to my wifi router which then attaches to my 24-port gigabit switch and all my devices except mobile and laptops when not docked, are hard wired. So WiFi is not even part of the equation unless I am using a phone or tablet. Everything is hard line.


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## Fugacity (Oct 1, 2004)

Ah yeah I forgot you can't even get past that nag screen of it not connecting so you can't tell. The edge can be setup as a MoCA bridge and the minis are moca capable, I think the POE filter is needed for it to work right though as well, not just so you don't broadcast your tivo to your neighbors (which doesn't seem to allow anything to connect anyway) But you could probably remove the cable line from the tivo and just run a coax from the edge to the mini with moca+ethernet enabled on your edge. Then tell the mini to use moca when trying to do initial setup. This has worked in reverse when people on the forum using moca have it stop working and can fix it by reconnect the minis with ethernet 1 by 1 to get it to work, so who knows what causes that problem. Since the vast majority of Tivo customers are ones that get the boxes from the cable provider my guess is that MoCA is more robust in some way, but that's just a personal theory.

But yeah network wise the network stuff should have worked.


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## krkaufman (Nov 25, 2003)

Fugacity said:


> But you could probably remove the cable line from the tivo and just run a coax from the edge to the mini with moca+ethernet enabled on your edge. Then tell the mini to use moca when trying to do initial setup.


I was going to suggest that, as well; just don't expect to be able to tune live TV.


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## Kendall Bennett (Dec 21, 2019)

I did have them all connected via Cable originally (just to see if it helps) but when I tried to enable Moca is did not work. But the DirecTV injector was no longer present so maybe they can't just magically connect if they are all hooked up? Might be worth trying it again to see what happens.


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## Fugacity (Oct 1, 2004)

Kendall Bennett said:


> did have them all connected via Cable originally (just to see if it helps) but when I tried to enable Moca is did not work.


The directv on is not required, and may or may not work. But if you are using the house coax network you need splitters that are 1600Mhz or above(typically labeled moca) and a POE Moca filter which reflects the signals backwards through the splitters to all the other devices.

Edge should be set up as a moca bridge (which will perform the same functions as the directv DECA), but if you can set it up as a bridge and then use one cable with no splitters to connect one mini and the edge it should be able to do the network connect on the mini


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## jonjaxonthe2nd (Jul 27, 2019)

i don't think of myself as a pro when it comes to Tivo setup, but after reading this thread it has me thinking what I would do. I have a smaller setup myself; one roamio, and one mini. I built a moca network for the mini because it was too difficult to run cat5 to my living room. The Roamio, however is in my bedroom and plugged into an Ethernet plug I installed. So the Roamio is cat5, but the mini is moca. They've worked great like this for years, but I do recall issues getting the mini to connect at first. I remember reading that they are finnicky. So I restarted and waited for what felt like forever for it to properly connect and start working. I wonder if you have tried putting all of your devices in one room. If I were in your situation I feel like I would have run a cat5 directly from where the isp comes in to one room with all my devices, plug in only the Tivo devices and the isp connected cat5 into a basic cheapo router. I would have nothing else connected whatsoever, and a new router so I can rule out those components. switch the hdmi to whichever device you want to check. What would happen in this scenario? If it works just add in one component from your existing setup and find the problem.


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## Kendall Bennett (Dec 21, 2019)

They constantly refused to admit there was a problem and then one day asked me to please try again (after I opened a BBB complaint). I was done and that point and just wanted my money back, but I decided to try again. I had even taken them to work to eliminate my local network at their request. My devices all applied some new updates, and guess what. It magically started working! So clearly this was 100% bugs in their software as I had been telling them since the beginning.


But I am done with TiVo and refuse to use their product as they refused to admit they fixed anything, and when I asked for them to comp me a lifetime service for the 4 plus months of screwing me around, they refused. They had refunded me for my yearly service, but expected me to fully pay up again to get these going. Basically they simply assume I am an idiot and don’t know what I am doing, but I am a software engineer with 30 years of experience and know networking inside and out.


So **** them. If I get over my anger maybe I will try again or maybe I will just sell it all. The Comcast X1 DVD is terrible, but I suffer through it because I am so pissed off.


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## Greg Werking (Jan 2, 2021)

I was remaking my home office and decided to bring out an old Tivo Mini. At first I thought I could connect via Wi-Fi, but soon realized that I needed to by a usb wifi adapter from TiVo for $60 or find another solution. I bought TP-Link TL-WR902AC ($39) based on the review posted here: The 9 Best Wireless Travel Routers of 2020. It was relatively easy to set it up in client mode and bring Wi-Fi to the TiVo Mini.

It took a while for all the updates, but it would not recognize my Edge, but finally did when I rebooted my Edge.

Now it works fine so far.

Thanks

Greg


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