Speaking of TiVo HD freezing....I think I had this problem early on. Where I would start a program...see a few seconds of video and the video would freeze, but the audio continued playing. I end up restarting the TiVo and eventually I could then watch the show. It was hard sometimes deciding if I would wait for it to finish recording though. I had tried either interrupting the intro video or letting it play out...didn't seem to make a difference. Not sure if it is related, but there were other times where I would have empty recordings.
Later I would also have the occasional crash/reboot of the TiVo HD....usually while it was recording something. But, as far as I can recall, it always happened when I was turning stuff on around it to use it. Sometimes I'd a message about unauthorized display flashing briefly. Now I leave my DVI switcher on all the time, and that seems to have solved that issue. The video freeze issue has also seemed to have stopped occurring. And, recordings so far have been reliable again. The other change in habit is that before I stopped using the TiVo HD, I would play a recording and pause it. Now, I just let it time out to live TV. I just hit the TiVo button before my receiver warms up, so I won't get blasted by whatever happens to be live. Largely a problem if it happens to be a commercial.....since those are deafening loud. I forget is there a dynamic range compression option on the TiVo....wonder if that I set the range on the cable DVR to narrow is why I hadn't noticed how much louder commercials are compared to programming. *Knock on wood* OTOH, I think all these problems happened when I added storage to my TiVo HD. I hadn't thought to look for signal information on the TiVo HD, the TiVo HD is connected to a PCB splitter along with a cable HD DVR and cable HD Tuner and my cable modem...so they should all be seeing the same signal level from the splitter. And, I graph the cable modem's signal in cacti. (Hmmm, it shows SNR as 36.8 currently, and in the last 24 hours min 36.45 and max 37.60....though I do see on the longer term it had been dropping...and then a sharp rise a couple week ago.) Doing a quick glance at the TiVo HD's diagnostics: signal strength is 100, and SNR is 36. Thinking back, in the early days of the cable HD DVR, I used to break into the diagnostics screens to see what kind of signal it was getting...and fiddling with expensive amps, filters, splitters, and such to manage things (I have a 4-way amp that was more expensive than the TiVo HD, also amped the return channel...but it made the forward power too strong for the cable HD DVR.)....eventually using good cables and good splitters seems to have everything happy....that I have 11 devices hanging off of the single cable jack in my condo. Wonder how things'll look when I get around to adding the 12th device. Been talking of building an HTpc or mac of some sort for several years....and this might be that year. On another subject....what I have found is my download use of Cox HSI has been got up significantly since I got the the TiVo HD. Hopefully they won't cut me off.
