On Episode 58 of his Hypercritical podcast, John Siracusa expresses into his frustrations with the TiVo Premiere Elite DVR. In particular: performance of the HD interface; recent software updates to the software; persistent use of the SD interface. This post is an informational response to Siracusa’s podcast, intending to offer background and context to his discussion, and possibly an explanation for why some things are as he perceives them.
Regarding performance in general, Siracusa focuses a lot of criticism on the notion that his Premiere Elite is presumably the fastest hardware, more CPU, more RAM, etc, and therefore should get faster over time (as do normal computing devices), but that the speed of the interface is much slower than historical models. It should be noted that until recently, the Premiere units’ software did not take advantage of all the hardware features. In particular, while the Premiere units have dual-core processors the second core was not activated until release 14.9.2.2, in December 2011. See this thread in the TiVo Community Forums for a user-based changelog and discussion of that release. It should be noted that the HD interface does not benefit from the second CPU core.
On a TiVo Premiere (standard, XL, and Elite) units, the device boots with the SD interface. I believe (but do not have any special knowledge to confirm) that this is so the device can properly sync its video signal, and display an usable interface, to any type of connected television. All of the device’s functions are controlled in the SD interface – including the choice to activate HD menus. The HD menus are nicer, prettier, and contain a lot of additional functions.Unfortunately, the HD menus are used mainly for viewing recorded content. If you need to do something related to the operation of the device — viewing the ToDo list, Season Pass manager, sound or video settings, channel lists, etc — the device reverts to the SD menus. This transition is quite jarring.
The HD menus, however, run in an alternate code branch which uses a specialized DSP chip. In software releases prior to 20.2 (released January 2012) the HD menus were implemented in Adobe’s Flash environment; the Flash code is executed in a Broadcom DSP chip devoted to this purpose. This implementation is a reason for the relatively slow HD interface. In version 20.2 the HD interface changed to being written in Adobe’s AIR environment, still executed through the DSP. The interface’s performance increased significantly as a result. Again, the TiVo Community Forum has a changelog thread for version 20.2. TiVo also posted an overview of changes in that release.
The HD interface’s addition features, such as the Discovery Bar and search results from Internet sources, also impact the interface’s responsiveness. When I disabled most of the Discovery Bar, and eliminated search results from sources for which I don’t have accounts, the interface got a lot faster. (It appears that the software conducts sub-searches, in real time, on the Internet to provide this additional information. Apparently the implementation requires the searches to all return before the interface fills in.)
To edit the Internet sources in your search results:
Settings & Messages -> Settings -> Channels -> My Video Providers
To edit the Discovery Bar to your liking:
Settings & Messages -> Settings -> Displays -> Customize Discovery Bar
I hope this post is instructive as to the raison d’être for the sources for Siracusa’s observations.
(Disclosure: My first exposure to TiVo was on an original 14-hour Philips unit in the Fall of 1999. I have owned a variety of TiVo DVRs from 2001 to today. I also own a wee amount of stock in TIVO.)
(Edits: Typos; My Video Providers; Customize Discovery Bar)