And Happiness Ensued

The final piece of our Tivo-DirecTV puzzle was the fact we had to use an IR blaster in order for the Tivos to change the channels on the DirecTV receivers. IR blasters are notoriously unreliable and we found this truism to be doubly true. Occasionally we would record an hour of black screen, sometimes we would record the wrong channel-- it all depended on how the IR blaster was working, if there was interference, and/or if there were two copies of the channel.

M and I looked high and low for a solution, but were unable to come up with anything. However, about two weeks ago, I was on the boards for one or the other of these systems and, about 20 posts down, saw a link someone had posted to an article about channel changing and Tivo/DirecTV. I read the article, which was about 2 years old and about a company on that was creating a device that would allow users to take advantage of the USB port on the back of the DirecTV tuner and the serial port connection on the Tivo and have it change channels.

I followed the link there and found a company called Paterson Technology , in WA. When I searched the site, I discovered the product in question was available for purchase, read some reviews of it by happy customers, and then perused the online documentation for it. It sure seemed like exactly what we needed to solve our problem. Our Tivo units and the two different types of DirecTV tuners were both listed on the list of supported hardware. Even better, they had put a chip into the device with some firmware that would allow you to program a "pass through" code that would take the Tivo channel request and change it to something else so that the DirecTV would go to the correct channel. This was, apparently, because they found their customers were annoyed by having two copies of the same channel, one in SD and one in HD, and the DirecTV tuner never seemed to default to the correct one. Gee, that sounded familiar!

I excitedly forwarded the information to M to review (she was out of town at a conference at the time) and she agreed it sounded like a good purchase and exactly what we needed. We agreed to just bite the bullet and order two, one for the bedroom and one for the living room, assuming we could return them if they didn't work.

The devices arrived yesterday and today I installed them.

*queue heavenly choir voices and ray of light shining down on the two entertainment systems*

The bedroom was the simpler install. I simply found the serial cable for the Tivo, plugged it in, plugged the serial connector side into the serial connector side of the new device, and then the USB side of the new device into the DirecTV receiver, uninstalled the IR blaster, and reset the Tivo to use the serial connection instead of the IR blaster, and we had instant success. Not only does it change channels faster, but there should be virtually zero chance of it changing to the wrong satellite channel because it is now all "hardwired."

The living room setup was trickier. On this setup, we have the HD/SD channel issue , which required me to use the firmware on the device to tell it how to change channels in order for us to receive the correct, SD version of each of the satellite channels. When I was finished going through it and programming it, we only had six channels not functioning correctly, but I was able to read the help files and figure out a secondary way to update those six and, when I last tested it, all of our dual channels were changing to the SD version we require.

This product is simple, does only and exactly what it says it should, was easy to install and update, and appears, as of right now, to work beautifully. I am very impressed with Paterson Technology's product and feel it was well-worth the $42 (each) the cable device costs. If you are having a similar issue with your Tivo and DirecTV system (either the IR blaster not working all the time or with HD/SD channel issues), I am highly recommending this device.