The Pass-Thru's the Thing

We have a rather complicated setup with our electronics in the front room of our house in order to get cable, our DirecTV, and TiVo to all function at the same time. One thing that made this slightly better was finding and purchasing a special pass-through cabel from Paterson Technology. This device hooks up from the TiVo USB to the DirecTV USB slot and changes the channels correctly for us.

The great thing about the Paterson pass-thru device is that you can flash the ROM on it and set it to redirect what the TiVo sends to the correct channel on the DirecTV. This was important when we got the HD receiver in that room, as we only have Standard channels via DirecTV and that meant that every channel that the TiVo turned to that had both an HD and an SD channel option needed to be redirected to the SD channel for us to view it. In other words, TNT is channel 245. However, the HD is 245 (1) and the SD is 245 (2). So if the TiVo changed to channel 245 without the pass-thru cable, we got 245 (1) and recorded an hour of a black screen.

A few days ago while I was trying to watch some TV, I noticed that every time I changed the channel in the front room, it was going to the next channel. By that I mean that I would enter 245 and I would get 246 (or whatever the next channel that was programmed). As we had the pass-thru cable set to use a redirection of "Next Channel" in order to get the SD programming in channel slot 2, I quickly realized that something had changed on the DirecTV and that the redirection was no longer needed.

All of this is a very long, technical explanation that shows a problem we had been having-- for awhile, our pass-thru was unable to consistently change the channels on the DirecTV, and we were frequently recording the wrong channel/show. A reset of the DirecTV unit would solve the issue, but it was annoying to deal with as we would get excited to sit and watch a favorite show and get something horrible like The Office instead, or the dreaded black screen.

Now that the DirecTV seems to have solved the issue and we no longer have to the redirection, the pass-thru and the TiVo are easily changing the channels and everything we have wanted to record in the living room has recorded with no issues.

What I find ironic is that we called DirecTV as well as emailing their support and reviewing their FAQs, all of which said this is how the system was supposed to be working the entire time. We complained about it and, as usual, got lied to by inept telephone personnel who didn't know as much about the system as we do.

We're hopeful that DirecTV now has its head out of its ass and it will continue to function as it is now. We're quite happy with the new setup and love that we can easily and quickly change channels and that our TiVo is recording the correct shows.