Well, we finally got a TiVo. I had been slightly resisting the notion of getting one, since I think they are expensive and I don't watch enough TV to make it worth the cost. But more than a couple times this past year, Tess and I have caught ourselves saying to one another "You know, if we had a TiVo, we could pause that show..." or "If we had a TiVo then we could have watched Six Feet Under even though we went to Phoenix this weekend..." So I guess having a TiVo is perhaps most helpful if you don't watch a lot of TV. Or you have a busy schedule with which those few shows you like don't coincide. Or something. A TiVo makes a nice gift, especially for those who find themselves waffling on the matter.

One more barrier to entry into the world of Digital Video Recorder ownership was the fact that you need a phone line for it to use. My TV is way over in one corner. I have cable, power, and 3 10/100 CAT5 drops back there. I don't have phone. My house, in fact, has only 2 phone jacks and the one closest to the TV sits on the other side of a sliding glass door. I didn't want to run phone line over the wall, and I can't get into the ceiling. I also don't want any more conduit on the outside of the house if I can help it. They say that you can buy a wireless modem (not, apparently, a wireless phone jack) if you don't have jacks nearby. Anyone who has been in my house knows that I need another wireless device like I need another project on the back burner. I'm running short on plugs in my house to boot.

The only "real" solution would be to crack open the case of the unit, add a NIC, and plug it into my existing 10/100mbps network. That means voiding the warranty (possibly before I even knew if the thing worked or not), ordering the kit over the Net, hooking it all up and hoping. It just looked like too much trouble to go through in order to have the ability to get that show I missed because I was traveling one weekend or had to work late or whatever.

Well, the Series 2 TiVo (the most current one) has USB ports on the back. That opened up some possibilities. I did some investigating. Turns out that the Series 2, it was rumored, has built-in (if "unsupported") support for various USB-to-Ethernet adapters which can plug into these ports. So Tess and I asked for TiVo for Christmas. I figured I could hammer out the networking issues when/if it came (this was last summer at some point) and I collected all the links I'd found into one place for safe keeping.

When it came time to unbox the TiVo yesterday, I had to go get an Ethernet adapter. I didn't know what kind to get. After looking through the links I'd saved, I realized that I'd never looked for a supported products list in my earlier research. (I suppose it never occurred to me, at the time, that one adapter would be supported when one other one wasn't; I also wasn't aware how many chipsets there are for USB Ethernet adapters.) After some time googling, I couldn't find a reliable list of supported adapters. I did find some long-ish lists of product names and such, but none of them had the same information. One list had a certain product, but two others didn't and so forth. I couldn't even pick one to link to, in fact. Figuring that the union of those lists would yield a supported adapter, I went to Fry's and picked up a Linksys USB100TX 10/100 USB Network Adapter.

I set up the TiVo last night. I figured out where it all was going to go, what unit was on top of what other one (we have a big 48" TV and we just put the various components on top of it: an A/V receiver, a DVD player, a cable box, an AudioTron and an Apple AirPort), and I got it all arranged so no one item will cook another. Then I realized that I was about to use up the last of my 3 Ethernet ports on my wall jack (the AirPort and AudioTron taking up the other two). Something about this really bugged me. But I had an idea.

I happened to snag an old 10mpbs hub from my brother Trey when I was at my mom's store over the holidays. A whole box full of aging network gear had come in, and he was going to donate the lot (the kind of people that shop at my mom's store don't buy "antique" computer hardware -- even if she had someone able to test it all to make sure everything worked before it went out on the floor). I rifled through it all and grabbed and clean-looking, rackmountable hub and some new patch cables (one can never have enough cables or wire). I was going to use it for network sniffing and testing and such (since it was a hub and not a switch), but because nothing in/on/around the TV takes up much bandwidth (the AudioTron streams MP3s which are sampled at only 128kbps; the AirPort runs 802.11b, which tops out at 11mbps -- a speed which is still much slower than most of the Internet sites it'll be used to view and not much faster than the top speed of the hub) the answer seemed to be clear: plug everything into the new hub behind the TV. I'd be burning an outlet, but I'd have a nice networking setup. After looking at the hub again, I realized that it had a surface mount kit on it, not the rackmount kit I thought it had. That made the decision all the more clear. I went and grabbed 4 wood screws and a drill and mounted the hub right onto the frame of the window behind the TV.

So I plugged everything in all over the place and turned it on. My previous research told me what I needed to do to get the TiVo to use the USB NIC instead of the phone line: when it came to set up the dialing properties, I told it to use a dialing prefix of ",#401" (no quotes). By the way, that is entered with "Pause Enter 4 0 1". I still gave it my phone number and area code and everything though -- it wouldn't continue without it. But that was all I need do, according to what I had read. (The advice was correct, as it turned out. But I didn't know that last night.)

So before I hit "Select" to have it start to go out and grab its update, I went over to the TV so I could see the lights on the hub and the NIC, with the latter having no link or activity lights at all. There was link on the hub, but nothing on the LEDs on the actual NIC. My heart sank a bit. For a moment I thought it was asking a little too much for someone who has never even used a TiVo to be able to get it set up using an unsupported, hypothetical network system using possibly dodgy parts rather than it's built-in modem and a phone line. I hit select anyway and went looking for the phone cord and phone jack splitter I had bought just in case. I didn't know if I'd like having a phone cord draping over my vertical blinds, but I thought I could maybe just plug it in once a week or something and tell it to update manually or something. What a disgusting, manual solution. The thought made me not want to have a TiVo at all; if it couldn't do Ethernet then it was of no use to me.

While I was getting the phone cord, it had apparently made some progress. The on-screen message said that the initial setup would take 10-20 minutes, but I had only been turned around for maybe 90 seconds. No network activity was present, but it was clearly doing something. Did the fact that it did whatever it had to do really quickly mean that it got out and grabbed the data over my fast cable modem link and didn't need to take the 20 minutes a phone line would need, or did it mean that it couldn't do anything at all network-wise and had decided to punt? There was no way to know, so I kept moving forward under the assumption that magic TiVo bits were very stealthy and didn't tickle NIC or hub LEDs. After it did it's initial processing, it said that it had to go out and grab actual programming information, so it could tell us what channel were what and so forth (meanwhile I'm still wondering if maybe it couldn't get out on the Net and decided to use some fallback setup config instead). It said I shouldn't use the phone for the next 45 minutes to an hour, and that it would take around 8 hours to process information thereafter. So I decided to keep one eye on the on-screen progress info and the other eye on the hub's lights while it did it's network thing.

After watching a while I still couldn't see anything on the adapter's LEDs, but after a bit the hub lit up like a Christmas tree. Maybe the USB adapter's LEDs need software support that the Linux-based TiVo wasn't giving it? Who cares. Success was at hand. We had achieved operational TiVo satisfaction as the unit was, in fact, getting on the Net sans modem or phone line. And it was doing a really good job of getting on the Net as well. I starting poking around in the system information menus and saw an entry for "System Status" or "Current System Activity" or something like that. After maybe 30 minutes of it doing it's thing, it was 41% done. Figuring that what should have taken like 3½ hours took only about half an hour, the whole process should have been done in 75 minutes or so (unless it had to do internal processing on the data it was grabbing, like decompressing gzipped files, building databases/indexes, etc.). I was going to figure out what the theoretical transfer rate was but I decided to get a beer instead (math and beer usually being mutually exclusive for me; if you're curious: figure a maximum estimated transfer of 40kbps for an analog modem, divide by "about 8 hours" and compare the actual time it took to move the file(s) to my TiVo -- which I didn't finish timing due to the beer, but which was "about an hour and change").

So we're essentially all set up. I'm not quite sure if I like the TiVo's menu or not. I told myself that any new interface takes getting used to. I also have to fix it up so that the TiVo remote can work the TV volume and whatnot, but that's easy. I can't wait to record Good Eats (of which I've seen perhaps half of the available episodes, even though I actively and consciously try to make time to watch it on the weekends), Conquest and Mail Call.

The only thing bugging me is that my A/V receiver now has a supremely annoying hum in it (it actually always had a bit of a hiss, but only when it was turned way up and was on the AudioTron input). It's a plain old 60 Hertz hum, but it happens when I listen to the AudioTron input, the DVD input, etc. And it's "sub-cyclical" as well: there's a "pulsing" to the hiss with about a one second period. This is with the TV's volume on mute. The only thing different is that I now have a TiVo plugged in to the same 120V leg as the receiver. I'm going to shut the TiVo off and pop in a DVD and see if it's still there. If anyone with more of an electronics clue than me (about 80% of the US population, probably) has any ideas, I'd love to hear any advice you have to offer...