All TiVo Premieres Get Update, Multi-Room Streaming Coming Monday

Posted on Saturday, January 28, 2012 by MegaZone

TiVo Logo The new version 20.2 TiVo software update should now be available to TiVo Premiere units. If your unit hasn’t received the update, it should do so automatically the next time it calls home. You can speed up the process by forcing a connection to download the update. Once the update has downloaded the TiVo will reboot at 2am to install it (unless it is recording at 2am, in which case it waits to finish before rebooting). You can also force the install early by rebooting the box yourself. TiVo’s Vice President, User Experience, Margret Schmidt, confirmed the update is available to everyone via Twitter:

All TiVo Premiere boxes (purchased from tivo.com or retail) are now authorized for the 20.2 update. “Connect to the TiVo Service now”

This update, which began rolling out in early January, brings with it a number of enhancements, most notably to the HD UI. One of the most highly anticipated features in 20.2 is multi-room streaming (MRS) between Premiere units. Margret states that this will be enabled for everyone on Monday:

Multi-Room Streaming will be turned on for TiVo Premiere boxes running 20.2 by Monday.

So if you have multiple TiVo Premiere units in your home, prepare to receive MRS.

She also had a further bit of good news for a special subset of TiVo Premiere users; those who used the on-screen clock SPS9S backdoor. As I detailed at the end of my previous post on the update, the on-screen clock and elapsed time indicator backdoor is no longer usable as it appears in the center of the screen instead of the lower-right corner.

I mentioned this to Margret on Twitter back on the sixth, and she replied:

Yeah, sorry, it was a victim of tradeoffs. I’ll see what I can do to get it restored in a future release.

But on Tuesday she was asked about it again, and this time the answer was more specific:

You can still get it if you start with an extra S. *However* it will show up in the center of the screen. Fix expected Spring

So it sounds like the backdoor functionality will be restored to a usable state in the spring release, 21.x. That’s currently expected in late April to early May. So, for those of us who used the backdoor, that’s something to look forward to.

About MegaZone

MegaZone is the Editor of Gizmo Lovers and the chief contributor. He's been online since 1989 and active in several generations of 'social media' - mailing lists, USENet groups, web forums, and since 2003, blogging.    MegaZone has a presence on several social platforms: Google+ / Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn / LiveJournal / Web.    You can also follow Gizmo Lovers on other sites: Blog / Google+ / Facebook / Twitter.
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  • Mentavlos

    One drawback that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere is that I can no longer filter the guide to only show kids programming. Or is there a secret new way to do this?

  • Mentavlos

    One drawback that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere is that I can no longer filter the guide to only show kids programming. Or is there a secret new way to do this?

  • Mentavlos

    One drawback that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere is that I can no longer filter the guide to only show kids programming. Or is there a secret new way to do this?

  • Mentavlos

    One drawback that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere is that I can no longer filter the guide to only show kids programming. Or is there a secret new way to do this?

    • http://www.gizmolovers.com/ MegaZone

      The loss of the ability to filter the guide has come up elsewhere and it sounds like TiVo is going to try to restore that feature in the next update, 21.x, which is officially slated for ‘Spring’ and unofficially for late April, early May.