TiVoCast Director Stephen Mack let me know via a comment that the issue where you can get stuck with a Wine Library TV TiVoCast subscription has been fixed. I’ve confirmed that it shows up and I was able to unsubscribe. So you can now check out Wine Library TV without fear of being trapped.
However, over the weekend I tripped over another bug, this one in TiVo Web Video. Before Systm was in TiVoCast I subscribed to it through TiVo Web Video. But while other Rev3 shows, like popSiren, are still in the Web Video list, Systm was dropped – apparently around the time it was added to TiVoCast. But it remained in my local config files in TiVo Desktop, and the only way to unsubscribe is via the on-TiVo list. So without it there it was a similar situation – stuck with the subscription. Fortunately I’m geeky enough that I manually edited the RSS feed and WSPC XML files in TiVo Desktop to kill it myself.
I renew my call for a local UI in TiVo Desktop to manage your RSS fees for TiVo Web Video. Right now the way I believe it is meant to work is that if TiVo drops a show from the TiVo Web Video list any users who subscribed to it will have their subscriptions killed automatically. (In my case I’m guessing some bug in TiVo Desktop caused it not to delete the subscription, putting me into the weird state where I couldn’t unsubscribe. At least it is better than TiVo Desktop wiping out the entire file by itself, which I’ve had happen three times now.) But that’s not very nice. You subscribe to a feed and you’re happy, but at some point in the future the episodes stop showing up. You might not notice at first, and then you’re missing your show. I think they should leave the existing subscriptions in place, which they could do if there were a UI in TiVo Desktop to allow users to unsubscribe later.
The UI should, of course, also allow users to add feed URLs that aren’t in TiVo’s pre-approved list. It is really quite silly that you need a separate RSS feed reader and then have to have TiVo Desktop ‘watch’ the folder for ‘unapproved’ feeds, when TiVo Desktop has everything required to handle it natively – except the UI to add and remove feeds. So you have to leave two server applications running on your PC all the time for want of a simple UI in TiVo Desktop.
I’m also having issues TiVoCast and TiVo Web Video. My Series3 has rebooted several times in the past couple of days (it just rebooted while I was writing this post, which is what reminded me) and it seems directly related to broadband video. Every time I’ve seen it happen the blue light was on just before the reboot, and in the Recording History there is a failed transfer with a spurious reason such as “was not found on the source” for TiVo Web Video, when I can see the file is there. And it’ll generally successfully transfer the same thing later. I’m getting a number of errors in Recording History, and there seems to be a trend for several to occur in a row – then a reboot. And, oddly, when the unit comes back the blue light often lights up – but there is no sign of a transfer happening. Not in the Now Playing List, nor in the To Do List. And when that happens it almost always reboots again before too long. So something is clearly amiss.
I’m just not having a lot of tech luck lately. The drive in my Series2 DVR-810H died a couple of days ago after 4.5 years of service, going out with a very loud Click of Death. It was the 80GB factory drive, so I’m replacing it with a 750GB drive from DVRupgrade. It costs a little more than imaging my own drive, but I’m really busy these days and it is worth it to me not to have yet another thing to find time to do. And today an external USB drive I use with my laptop stopped showing up. Still spinning, so maybe it is the enclosure, but then again it is also pretty hot to the touch, so it may be dead. Fortunately it was shows I’d saved via TiVoToGo, which while annoying to lose isn’t a crushing blow, and backups of other drives. So nothing mission critical. (I coincidentally ordered another drive the other day, so I guess that’ll be a replacement.) I’m still troubleshooting this one. I’d be happy if nothing else failed on me in the near future.
My S3 just rebooted again, as expected. And now the blue LED is off, so hopefully it will be up for a while this time.
