Will tivo work with unique cable service?

[unborracho]

Hi, this is my first post here but i've been lurking for quite a while.

I'm interested in buying a tivo, but one question that recently arose in my mind was would it work with my cable at college. The cable system in the dorms is really weird, as they basically run their own cable service, so the channels are completely unique and would probably not be listed in the TiVo database.

My question is, can you manually configure TiVo to work with these channels? as in can you pick which channel is what on a setup menu or something?

Thanks!

[Hirudin]

Hi, I don't know much about this, but there's some kind of way to "remap" your channels. As I haven't done this, I don't know if it works, or how easy it is.

I guess what you would do is set up TiVo with a cable service in your area. Then you would go in and remap the channels to what they are. If FOX is channel 2 from the cable company, but it comes in on channel 8 in the dorms, you'd remap channel 8 to 2.... or something like that.

I'd try searching for "remap"

[captain_video]

I don't know if SA Tivos have any sort of remap function but I used to run into your situation all the time a while back. I used to carry a ReplayTV with me on the road for about two years on a job that took me all over the country. I stayed in a lot of extended stay residences that had proprietary cable serice similar to what you're dealing with. IOW, the cable channels didn't match up with any of the local cable services.

What I ended up doing was making a cross-reference list of all of the channels provided on the in-house cable system and then I looked for a local cable service that carried all of the same channels. Some of the channels usually lined up but most of them were different. I would basically set up my weekly recording schedule based on the time slots and channels and not the program name for obvious reasons. If I was lucky enough to have a show on the channel I wanted to record that had the same start and end times then I would simply set up that show for recording. If the times didn't line up then I'd have to set up a manual recording. I could still use the on-screen guide to see what shows were coming up but I had to set up the recording based on my cross-reference list of channels. It's a pain but at least I was still able to record the shows I wanted if I had to work late, which I often did.

[classicsat]

There is no official re-map function, although I belive there is a Tivoweb module to assist in that.

[Falcon4]

Darnit! I've been searching for a solution for this problem for quite some time today. I'm at a hotel now that has some kind of weird cable service, and I want to enable my TiVo to pick up and record from the huge channel list that cable provides - because when I get back home, it's back to air (broadcast) TV for my poor TiVo.

I've searched everywhere, I'm learning things that make no sense (I guess for old 2.x OS versions), like channel.dat (or channels.dat?) and the "mvchannels" script, but I can't get anything working.

Does anyone know how to modify the lineup on a 3.x OS? =\

[eastwind]

Darnit! I've been searching for a solution for this problem for quite some time today. I'm at a hotel now that has some kind of weird cable service, and I want to enable my TiVo to pick up and record from the huge channel list that cable provides - because when I get back home, it's back to air (broadcast) TV for my poor TiVo.

I've searched everywhere, I'm learning things that make no sense (I guess for old 2.x OS versions), like channel.dat (or channels.dat?) and the "mvchannels" script, but I can't get anything working.

Does anyone know how to modify the lineup on a 3.x OS? =\
Call TiVo Customer Support. IIRC, they can make a custom lineup for you to select in GS.

ew

[Falcon4]

(Yay! A reply!)

Do you really think they will? What'd I do, tell them every channel description on the TV? I really don't think they'd do such a thing for just one person, but that's just because I really don't want to bug TiVo about something like this - then everyone would bug them to add their hotel or whatever.

Right now, here's what I did to remap about 4 channels to their proper slots (the only channels I was able to remap both because I can't find the matching channel and because the method is so SLOW!)
- Installed TivoWebPlus and the ChannelMap module
- Changed the daily call prefix to ,#257 (57600bps serial connection)
- Connect laptop to internet via dialup (else the PPP connection only lasts about 5 seconds)
- Run a test call
- Get a 2- or 3-minute window to do whatever I need to do over TCP/IP before the connection times out (it never does successfully complete the "call" over serial, and the connection is excruciatingly slow and error-prone, even at 9600 bps!), learning the IP address via Windows' connection status window.
-- Use Telnet to start tivoweb
-- Use web browser to, very slowly, get to the TivoWebPlus page and get/set channel numbers
- When connection drops, retry the connection test and increment IP address by 1.
...

*sigh* Is there no easier way?

By the way, thanks for the reply no matter what. I've been watching this topic like a, ehm... hawk?... waiting for a reply. I really want to get this thing running! =\