TiVo Roamio Plus HD Digital Media Player

Once your Tivo Roamio dvr is correctly installed and working properly, it's wonderful. The tv picture is beautiful and the remote is easy to use. I didn't find the remote completely intuitive, so reading the directions helped me thru the rest. I find the remote very comfortable in my hand. After a bit of practice the Tivo Central menu is very easy to navigate. It's quicker to use the remote to get to the channel guide or live tv than the Tivo Central menus. The remote needs to be synced to your particular Roamio. Tivo customer support walked me thru it quickly and easily. The Tivo Roamio also offers access to streaming tv. We have subscriptions to two paid services and two free services. Access to these is part of the Tivo Central menu under My Shows. Tivo will use your existing services to help you find tv shows not available on cable. We can only use three of our four subscription services. Opera is the browser that comes with the Tivo. The Opera “store” offers a number of apps. This includes more tv services and games. I haven't tried to check on which services cost and which are free. It doesn't offer the number of apps that our Roku 3 does. The Roku 3 attaches to the tv thru an HDMI cable attached to another port. Just use the tv's original remote's input and switch between services. You can continue to access your DVD player and gaming devices the same way. This Tivo Roamio dvr came with a power cord and a remote. It needs an HDMI cable to attach to the tv. Tivo didn't provide one. Unless you already have one on hand, you'll need to purchase one separately. I found this out while reading the set up directions. I found it easier to register my Tivo Roamio dvr and mini over the phone than online. Because of the many set up problems I had due to bad information from customer service reps at Tivo and my cable company I wasn't able to register during the set up process. I chose this Tivo Roamio because it was capable of recording up to six shows at once or handling one Tivo mini with one tuner and record on the other five tuners. This Tivo doesn't record over the air. Over the air recording isn't important to me, but recording from cable is. You will need a multi-streaming computer card from your cable or satellite provider. While this Tivo Roamio dvr is compatible with most digital tv providers, IT ISN'T COMPATIBLE WITH ALL CABLE AND SATELLITE TV PROVIDERS. READ THE INFORMATION IN THE PRODUCT DESCRIPTION OR DOUBLE CHECK AND CALL YOUR DIGITAL TV PROVIDER. This is an expensive product and you don't want to make any errors in buying it or having to return it. While the Tivo instructions appear very easy, they don't cover any problems related to trouble shooting. Error messages do appear on the tv screen and refer you to online documents. The easiest way to access these documents is using the complete url provided at the end of the screen. Use channel down on the Tivo remote to take you to the end of the screen information. Use your search engine and the complete url to find the document explaining the error message. I tried logging into my Tivo account and finding it there with no success. There are three different ways to hook up your new Tivo dvr. The easiest is over the wifi. The other two are by MoCa net or ethernet. If you don't plan to use any Tivo minis, which need to be connected by MoCa or ethernet, wifi is just fine. Other Tivo dvrs also work over wifi. I don't know if they will talk to each other. I wanted a Tivo mini because there was no additional subscription fee to use it. It was cheaper than buying another Tivo dvr. I assume, but didn't check that each Tivo dvr would need its own subscription service. You can go monthly, annually or a lifetime fee. I chose monthly, though annual would've been a bit cheaper. MoCa net and ethernet weren't so easy for me to understand or even know if I had. I did a lot of online reading which confused me more. A MoCa net works over the existing cable tv wires in your house. Just because you have cable wires in your home doesn't mean you have a MoCa network. I called my cable company customer support and was assured I had it. It turns out I didn't. Ethernet sounded expensive and time consuming to set one up. I don't have an ethernet in my home. My modem/router is on second floor while my tvs are on another. Ethernet cables need to be hooked into the router and directly into the dvr. If your router and tv are very near each other it might be worthwhile to connect them by ethernet cables. Even if I didn't want to run ethernet cables thru my walls, I would still need extraordinary long cables to reach my first floor and basement and then safely cover them so no one tripped over the wires, especially my very spazzy old dog. I didn't check on finding cost of cables or having ones that were long enough made. Technical support from my cable company and Tivo itself was not very helpful. At all times customer support reps were pleasant, polite, and professional. After my first few calls I received a lot of misinformation. I was frustrated and rude at times. I begged, whined, screamed and one time cried. A couple of times a rep really truly tried to solve my problem. At timesTivo or cable said the other company was responsible. At its worst, I was transferred directly from one company to the other and back again. An example of misinformation was that all my wifi devices had used up all my router IP addresses. The average router can handle around 250 IP addresses. Even if I turned on every wifi device we owned at one time, we wouldn't come close to using that many IP addresses ever. Customer support reps at both companies aren't well trained in trouble shooting problems and providing very many helpful solutions. In almost every single case the go to solutions were to unplug and then plug back in my router, modem and Tivo dvr. The other solution was to check that all the cables were were tightly connected. If you reboot all your equipment and check on all your connections and it doesn't work, you don't want to keep doing it every time customer support offers it as your first two solutions. Ignore this piece of advice too. I was told more than once to hook up a MoCa POE filter (a cable I think) to the tv cable box outside of my house. It would be so-o-o-o easy to do. I finally found where the cable wires entered the house. There was simply no way for me to see how anything could be attached to the very heavy duty wires coming into the house. Setting up a MoCa net inside my home was very easy ONCE I had the right equipment. It was a Tivo customer rep who suggested I needed an Ethernet Moca bridge. I got mine from the Tivo store. It consisted of one Actionetic MoCa network adapter Model ECB 25000, 1 coax cable and 1 ethernet cable. I attached it to the modem/router, a single unit in my case. The instructions were clear and simple. Following the Tivo dvr set up instructions again, it said my MoCa network was enabled, but I still wasn't able to connect to it. Once my final problem was solved, it worked. Check this as your final solution if your newly installed MoCa network still doesn't work. (If it still doesn't work after this final idea, find somebody that installs Tivos.) I didn't want to unplug my cable company equipment until I was sure my new Tivo dvr was working properly. Unplug the cable company equipment. Connect the Tivo Roamio dvr directly to the wall cable. Don't have any connections to any cables on a splitter. Try setting up the Tivo dvr following the original instructions provided with it. Select your MoCa set up. Mine worked on the first try. Set up is time consuming, because of waiting for the dvr to get its updates from Tivo. Mine took almost two hours. The Tivo mini was easy to set up, along with the waiting time. I'd suggest a book or a movie on your computer or pad to pass the time. This whole process took almost three weeks from the day my Tivo Roamio dvr arrived until our techie friend read up on MoCa networks and came over and helped us. After the Tivo dvr set up was completed, the Tivo mini was just as easy to set up following the instructions it came with. Again, once my Tivo dvr and mini were properly set up reception is beautiful. After a bit of learning to navigate the Tivo Central menus and remote everything is very easy to access. I love it. For the three weeks I went thru trying to get it to work I seriously thought about returning it. The cost of my Tivo dvr and mini will pay for themselves in about 10 months using the cable equipment rental costs as my guide. After quizzing my cable company service rep about the itemized costs on my bill I was able to drop a couple of more services. In our house we love our HBO. We have HBO Go set up on our computers for when we travel. If our hotel doesn't offer HBO, we use HBO Go. HBO has announced it will be offering a streaming tv subscription service in 2015. If we can get the same shows cable tv offers on HBO, I will drop my cable HBO and cut back on my cable services. I only keep the premium cable service for the access it provides to HBO. We will use the HBO Go subscription service instead. I'm not ready to drop cable and go cordless yet. There are still channels that my cable company offers that aren't available on our streaming tv services. If I ever do, my Tivo Roamio dvr and mini will be nothing more than paperweights.