Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

Today, I came home late from work...and found sitting on my doorstep that FedEx has left the TiVo HD DVR there. Odd, when I ordered the Cox HD DVR, they wouldn't do that...and even though I waited at home all day by the front door, they claim that I wasn't there to make the delivery (ignoring that it was the first K-State football home game of the season...or perhaps the real reason?)

Anyways....I just moved the box aside, since I intend to hook it up digitally and not knowing how quickly the woot order would ship, I had put off buying DVI and/or HDMI cables. Though I had a good idea of what would be needed, since the TV is DVI and the TiVO HD is HDMI. What I hadn't worked out full is placement of it and my Zektor DVI switcher. Or what pieces of tech that have an input on my TV need to move onto the DVI switcher, because I'm out of digital audio inputs on my receiver.

The plan is that I'll likely move my Momitsu V880N to using DVI. The OTA HD tuner will probably be retired as a result of the TiVo HD DVR (and not because it only sees one station and poorly)....but that digital audio output had already been bumped. Since unlike my setup in Columbus with TimeWarner, I have both an HD tuner and an HD DVR from Cox. Not ready to retire the HD tuner from my mix...but perhaps some day it'll go.

I suppose the only outstanding issue I haven't figured out is whether I need open return path for the TiVo's cable connection. I have a 4 way and an 8 way splitter....the 8 way has no return path and is off of one of the 4 way splitter outputs. I have my cable modem, Cox HD Tuner and Cox HD DVR on the other 3 outputs of the 4 way. 7 of the 8 outputs are my ReplayTV...the 8th has floated around a bit depending on what gadget I wanted to try....on the HDTV for using its internal tuner, a DVD recorder that I had to see if TVGuide data was available, the OTA receiver to see if I could do clear QAM....

Now that I think of it, I probably should've checked Amazon.com for an upgrade of the 4-way splitter...I think the next up is an 6-way (want to minimize the split loss at that 'tier'). But, I once again used Amazon Prime to order a bunch of DVI/DVI and HDMI/DVI and Toslink cables....discovered that the 3.99 upgrade to 1 day service is per item, not per shipment or order. In retrospect I might have scaled down the size of the order to just what I needed to get the TiVo HD going, and leave the rest for free 2 day service. But, I guess I'm not thinking clearly right now

Initial setup will be a weekend project, not sure how it'll go on getting the Cablecards.