pyTivo Discussion Forum

krkeegan · Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 8:35 am Post subject: 9.3 has improved S3 boxes

I am very happy with the 9.3 update on my TiVoHD. The response time on menus is soooo much better. And the response in browsing pyTivo is super fast now. It is like it used to be when HMO first came out.

I think the faster browsing should pretty much eliminate the last few glitches people were having with the hack83 support.

Very excited.

PaulS · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 140

9.3a has introduced a problem for me. I suspect an HDMI handshake issue. I've opened up a trouble ticket with TiVo in hopes of getting it fixed.

I finish watching a video transferred to my S3 (video set for "native") with pyTivo. Playback was completely fine, no issues at all. I delete that video, and as soon as I re-enter the TiVo menus, I get an entire screen of "colored snow". Navigating the menus makes the TiVo sounds, but the video remains snowy until I do something to make the S3 change resolutions (go to LiveTV and channel up until I hit a 1080i channel).

This is 100% reproducable with pyTivo transferred content. Videos that are recorded from cable play back and delete without issue.

So, it could very well be pyTivo related. Perhaps messing up the MPEG decoders and/or HDMI handshake as the video (which isn't a "standard" format like 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i) is unloaded from the box...

krkeegan · Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 2:14 pm Post subject:

Hmm, well that sucks. I have mine set to 1080 all the time. I will see what happens for me.

wmcbrine · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 444

Resolution changing with HDMI seems to be problematic in general. When I got a new TV recently and hooked it up via HDMI, I'd get colored snow any time I changed the resolution; I had to turn the TV off and back on to get the picture back. So I set it to 720p fixed. (Interestingly, the TiVo had chosen this mode itself when I first hooked it up via HDMI -- previously the TiVo was connected to a 4:3 SDTV via s-video and set to 480i fixed.) This was with a Series 3 running 9.2a.

PaulS · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 140

I never had a problem until the 9.3a upgrade hit. Things were great with 9.2 and pyTivo.

I do notice when I channel surf (which is rare) that when I transition between resolutions (720p->1080 or vice versa) that there is a flash of this colored snow, but the S3 and display always re-sync and display the picture. It's only when I delete a pyTivo video that things get messed up now.

I'd prefer to keep my S3 in "native" video mode, and allow my Lumagen video scaler to do the upscaling (rather than the S3 or my front projector).
Setting the S3 to "720p fixed" would probably lose some picture quality for me, as well as render my scaler purchase useless.

As I said, I do have a work around, but it's just a pain to do every time I watch something transferred via pyTivo.

MasterCephus · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 156 Location: Hueytown, AL

Hey I have had the colored snow problem as well!

It's not just a pyTivo issue. It only happened to me when I watched some videos via pyTivo for while. My case would be like this:

I would select the video to be transferred. Then I would start to watch the video while transferring and get white snow...if I click the input button to scroll through my TV's different AV inputs, when I get back to my HDMI (Tivo), it would be at the TIvo Central screen. I could then select my video and watch it...very weird. This happened rather often to me (I believe pre 9.3).

Now last night one of my cable cards was not giving any sound to a couple of my HD channels so I thought that I would restart my Tivo. So when it restarted, I got the white snow during the "THX" screen...I had to hit my input button again to scroll through my inputs on my Tivo and when I went back to my Tivo, it was fine...

To me this is a very big bug....but not a pyTivo bug...

philhu · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 121

I have to second (or third) the increase in NPL display speed with 9.3 on my tivoHD.

I noticed it displays so much faster, and while checking out my pytivo system, I noticed that I had turned OFF precache
while I was testing and forgot to turn it back on! And things display faster anyway!

wmcbrine · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 444

Precache doesn't actually make a difference in list speed anyway, since my patch to only call ffmpeg when displaying detailed info.

philhu · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 121

Ah, that explains why is isnt slower Smile

I do notice it is faster now thoughI used to wait 4-5 seconds per page, now it is less than 2