TiVo Bolt 500 GB DVR: 4K UHD Recorder

I’ve read a lot of comments here and noticed a couple of ‘repeat offender’ criticisms that TiVo has already addressed. So here are a few tips to enhance your Roamio OTA experience:

1) Although you will not be able to completely escape the annoying ads, the most egregious ad display to my eyes is the large one that appears when pausing playback. This ad can be minimized by pressing the “down” arrow located under the large “Select” button on your remote. There is an onscreen note (located on the lower right corner of the ad itself) suggesting this.

2) You can “super” fastforward or rewind approximately 15 minutes of programming at a time by first pressing the ff button, then pressing either the forward button or the circular arrow button located above the green “D” button and yellow “A” button, respectively. Each time you press the forward/circular arrrow button, the program will advance/rewind another 15 minutes.

3) I’m still figuring these out, but a) the ‘live recording’ function of the Roamio allows you to press pause on one program, then change the channel, and then return to your original channel and watch that program from the pause point. My cable company’s DVR did not do this…it ‘erased’ the live recording as soon as I changed channels. Also, b) if you press “Live TV” more than once, it scrolls through your various tuner channels.

After cutting the cord in June of this year, I quickly went into mourning over the loss of my DVR. I missed it far more than the extra cable channels. I had been researching different ways to cobble together a frankenstein DVR, but based on user/tinkerer comments, I knew the upfront costs would be fairly high and that I still would not be able to match my cable DVR’s functionality. Thanks to KinjaDeals, I was alerted to the $300 TiVo Roamio OTA with Lifetime Subscription deal back in October. Now that I see the current $600 price tag and have had the full TiVo experience, I am *relieved* that I took a chance on the Roamio and grabbed that deal! Wow. (Seriously, join/follow Kinja Deals. They’ve guided me to a $15 Mohu Leaf antenna, this TiVo, $22 Channel Master distribution amp, and many other sales). The TiVo is even better than my old cable provider’s DVR and makes my entire OTA experience feel richer and complete, similar to that of the cable TV arrangement that cost me $100/month. It’s hard to explain because it’s not like I have more channels than I did before, but that’s the feeling I have nonetheless. The TiVo has virtually replaced my Roku as the way I watch Netflix — there’s a great feature that allows you to create a OnePass for your Netflix shows and then adds them to your “My Shows” list just like whatever ABC/CBS/CW/NBC programs that have been recorded. As a result, everything you are interested in watching appears in list form on one screen. It’s a nice feature and so convenient. The only negative, for me, is that I can’t watch/access my SlingTV service via the TiVo, so the Roku is still a necessity for that. The ability to add more apps/streaming services would be great. It’s really all that is missing. The TiVo is also a great universal remote.

I also purchased the 3-year/$40 extended warranty from the TiVo site a couple of weeks ago. (The extended warranty must be purchased within 60 days of TiVo activation.) I resisted for a while, because I generally think extended warranties are just money grabs, but then figured that it was a good move considering a) that I would not be protected from catastrophic/maintenance issues otherwise and b) the amount of money I saved on the Romio OTA & Lifetime Subscription in the first place.

Note that I have read that the TiVo may cause a loss of signal strength from your antenna to the TiVo/TV. Since I had experienced intermittent “no signal” channel dropoff issues with a couple of my most-watched channels prior to installing the TiVo, I was hyper aware of the potential to exacerbate this issue. I’ve never been certain if the dropoffs were caused by my antenna setup or the broadcast stations themselves, although I suspect it’s a combination of both. Anyway, I did notice a reduction of signal strength (a bar or so) with a few of my channels once I installed the TiVo. I purchased a Channel Master CM3414 Distribution Amplifier to see if I could boost the signal (or recover the losses hypothetically due to the TiVo) to the TiVo TV and to the rest of the house. I saw no significant improvement (some gains, some losses in strength, but most remained essentially the same) and returned the amp for a refund.

P.S. I would like to extend a very heartfelt THANK YOU to user G. Friedleyon who posted a review on October 6, 2015 which gave step-by-step instructions for setting up the TiVo/subscription account. At the time there was much confusion and finger-pointing between Amazon and TiVo and those directions were so excellent that it only took me 20-30 minutes to complete the setup.

I tried Tivo once about seven years ago. I was appalled by the non-intuitive organization of the screens and with the clumsiness of navigation among screens. I found it very frustrating. But seven years have passed since then, and I expected that in this much time, Tivo would have come to their senses and fixed at least a few of the more glaring problems with their design. Not so. In 2017, it is very much the same piece of unmitigated garbage that it was seven years ago.

Let me give you one obvious example. With the exception of the on-screen quide, most everything else you do, that is interactive, is done by pressing the Tivo button. The problem is that once you press it, there is no simple, straightforward way to get back to watching the recording you were watching when you pressed the Tivo button. (If you were watching live TV, you can press the Live TV button.) The only way that I have found, to get rid of the Tivo Central screen or any of the subordinate screens, is to navigate to the recorded program as though you were not already watching it, then select it, and then select “Resume”. The Clear button does nothing, and even though the Back button sometimes has a function that prevents it from being used for this purpose, there is no reason why the Back button should not have been used for this purpose when you are in the Tivo Central screen, which screen you can reach using the left arrow or the Back button. But the Clear button does not appear to have any conflicts that would preclude it from being used to return you to watching either live TV or the recording that you were watching when you pressed the Tivo button.

For that matter, pressing the Tivo button when you are in the Tivo Central screen or its subordinate screens should simply clear the screen of all the menu stuff. But instead of doing what was obvious and intuitive, Tivo did something remarkably stupid: they made it so that if you press the Tivo button when already in the Tivo Central screen, the My Recordings page opens. Why couldn’t they have just gone with the simple and obvious behavior that applies to the Guide button? Most likely their thinking was that they would avoid the need for a dedicated button to access My Recordings if they made it so that a double-press of the Tivo button does that same thing. But they overlooked the need for the user to clear the screen of the Tivo Central screen and go back to the full-screen viewing of a recording, through steps that are reasonably straightforward. Memo to Tivo: In every state except only states where it is entirely certain that the Clear and Back buttons would not do anything useful, they should both be assigned functions. In particular, the Clear button should return you to watching either live TV or the recording you were watching instead of live TV.

I could go on and on with a fairly long list of similarly cumbersome, illogical aspects of their design. In order to have the ability to delete a program when you are done watching it, you have to enable this in the preferences. Yes, that’s right, you cannot perform the simple task of deleting a program you’re done watching without first enabling this, in the user preferences. Specifically, you press the Tivo button, then you scroll down to the bottom item on a list of seven submenus (why aren’t the menu items numbered so that you won’t have to be constantly scrolling up and down all these screens?). The bottom of the list is “Settings & Messages”. After highlighting this item, you either press the Select button or the right-arrow button on the navigation pad, then you use the down arrow button again and click it several times to highlight User Preferences. From there, you select OnePass & Recording, then finally scroll down to highlight Keep Until. You then use the right and left arrow keys on the navigation pad to select between “Space needed” or “Until I delete”. Ugh. Is it natural for these two choices to be mutually exclusive, or are they this way only because Tivo artificially made them this way? If I select “Until I delete” and then if I allow it to fill up, what happens? Will it stop recording? More to the point, if I select “Space needed”, why should this preclude me from manually deleting a recording? If I had the ability to manually delete a recording even when “Space needed” has been selected, then I would obviously be able to select “Space needed, and this selection would give me some assurance that the thing will behave in a reasonably intelligent manner if I get careless and allow it to fill up.

One of my least favorite features is the OnePass paradigm. It probably is desirable for people who like to use Tivo for watching streaming video, but for people who don’t, it obfuscates and complicates the basic concept of recording all broadcast episodes of some series. To some extent you can simplify it through user preferences, but it is a hassle to do this, and even though I’ve tried for several hours to get it configured for just broadcast TV that comes to me via the cable, I still have a lot of stuff that to my way of thinking is just clutter and unnecessary complication.

I could go on, but I’m tired, and tomorrow morning I have to get up and then figure out whether I’m allowed to return this abomination and avoid paying even one penny to Tivo.