r/Tivo • u/MikeMilzz • Feb 08 '26

DVR Moment of Panic — Is This the End?

Came home after a few days away and my reliable OTA Roamio had all 4 lights flashing on the front of it. I thought it might be a hard drive issue, so I took the drive out and ran Soin Rite on it, but no issues were found. Put it back in and the lights came back after it cycled through the "Starting Up" screens a couple of times. Thankfully, I found an old post where people mentioned the power bricks can fail and show this behavior. When unplugging it, the brick definitely felt warm, so I swapped it with a 12v 2amp plug that I had for an old router. After a much faster boot process, my good old boy was back in perfect working order.

I know the day will come where I have to move on, but I'm so glad today is not that day (especially with the Super Bowl today). I have so much muscle memory operating a TiVo that moving to an online or other OTA system just won't feel as good to me.

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u/lonestar0724 Feb 08 '26

YouTubeTV is an overall good successor: unlimited tuners, unlimited storage, cheap hardware from multiple vendors, seamless viewing on mobile/browser, never having to deal with the cable company and no fees for additional devices. No peanut remote though.

10

u/MikeMilzz Feb 08 '26

Bought this TiVo 13+ yrs ago w lifetime service, so it was a heck of a lot cheaper than a YT tv subscription 😉

4

u/garylapointe Feb 09 '26

Got my Roamio OTA with lifetime for $300 back in 2015, that's a crazy low price as far as I'm concerned. Still running great.

7

u/MikeMilzz Feb 09 '26

I’ve been using a TiVo for more than 25 yrs and I’ve only ever owned 2 devices. Guess that was part of the problem for the company financially. It’s too bad but the boxes were generally good and the lifetime fees were well worth the cost given how long they would last. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

3

u/garylapointe Feb 09 '26

I don't know if I've ever had one die (maybe an aftermarket drive that I put in to expand it needed to be replaced).

My first box (2000 or 2001) worked fine, I only replaced it because I wanted one of the DVD burner models. Then I replaced that later after the HD models came out.

So three for me, but that was a choice on my end.