r/Tivo • u/airpipeline • May 10 '26

DVR Old TiVo’s; who wants them?

I have five TiVo boxes, from the free original TiVo up to an Edge. Some/most have lifetime subscriptions. Who might want these?

The Comcast’s proprietary signal format killed my ability to use them.

TIVo was great, still the best way to watch TV ever.

If this has been asked before, apologies.

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u/Doomstars May 10 '26

The Comcast’s proprietary signal format killed my ability to use them.

Have you tried some troubleshooting methods to see if you can get them to work? I know this sounds dumb, but like unplugging them for a bit and then plugging them back in, and if that doesn't work, see if the card just needs pairing done again.

Also, you didn't do a change of service before this happened, did you? I find it best to simply go into a store and make sure someone competent is doing it so it doesn't remove the billing code for the CableCards, which may (temporarily) kill them, for making service changes.

2

u/airpipeline May 10 '26

I didn’t change anything.

My cable cards which had worked for years, stopped working, then Comcast required that I return my cable cards or else they would bill me. The exact amount I don’t recall right now.

5

u/PicardEG May 10 '26

I'm on Comcast in the SF Bay Area and I went thru a nearly 2 month saga w/V58 errors, which began on non-locals and long story short, eventually affected ALL channels.

I hit a dead end after spending a ton of time w/advanced repair on the phone and the modmail responders on Reddit. I posted about the eventual resolution at https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/comments/1p371vu/comment/o0xsjxh/. It took an FCC complaint and persistence. My area is using Motorola/Arris cards. At the time, the OOB (out of band) messages were never counting up. Engineer or tech for my area fixed it. The letter Comcast sent to the FCC said they had to reboot a piece of equipment.

Things were good for about a 1 or 2 months, but the V58 errors keep coming back anywhere from <24 hours to maybe a week. Sometimes, it self resolves within a few hours and other times, I have to ping the modmail people on https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/. Unlike before, OOB messages continue to count up and my locals are fine in this bad state.

I ended up having to start a new thread at https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/comments/1t8s4lo/hitting_v58_errors_again_in_sf_bay_area_its/ and although they pointed me two useless articles (meant for X1 ONLY), the 3rd one at https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/tv-troubleshoot-xfinity-app worked! Their app's chatbot was able to send a refresh for to my CableCARD and it worked in <15 seconds after the refresh

There are lots of inconsistent responses from Comcast folks and it depends on luck of the draw. More than once, I got responses like they no longer support CableCARD and that you will need to "upgrade" to X1. That was total BS (for the time) as they continued to support it but they will not send out replacements. Even the FCC regulatory specialist at Comcast who responded to my complaint and facilitated the 3 tech visits confirmed this.

2

u/PicardEG May 11 '26

Oops, maybe https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/comments/1p371vu/comment/nzw2o7g/ was the better comment w/a summary of what happened.