Full House TiVo

How I watch TiVo in every room of my house…

Watching TiVo in every room of my house

I’m a bit of a home theater junkie and have owned a TiVo since 1999. Its added incredible freedom to our TV viewing and I wanted to extend that freedom to every room in my house, here’s how I did it.

Step 1 - Make a direct connection

I switched from cable to satellite service for the better picture quality (this was over five years ago, cable has got its digital act together now).  So the satellite box was connected directly to the TiVo box without using any of the cable TV wiring running through my house.

Step 2 - Unplugged

I disconnected the cable company’s video feed at the junction box in my house.

Step 3 – The TiVo feed

Using the house’s existing cable wiring for the room that my TiVo sits in, I fed its video coax output (the one that sends the video out as channel 3 / 4) back to the cable TV junction box and made it the new cable video source. This was actually a simple step at the junction box – disconnect that room’s cable as one of the outputs of the video splitter and make it the new input to the splitter (this is where the cable company feed was disconnected in Step 2).

At this point, I could watch my TiVo in every room of the house, but I needed to have control from every room…

Step 4 – I’m in control

I picked up a set of the wireless remote extenders from Radio Shack (checking today, these are available for $39.95 as Model:15-1950 ). The remote extenders allowed me to send commands from the TiVo remote to any room in the house. I placed the receiver module in front of my TiVo and then one transmitter in each room of the house. They work fairly well, once in a while I need to move one for better transmission, also they hate to be in direct sunlight – it causes them to get very confused until they’re moved.

 
At this point I could watch and control TiVo from any room – I’m in TiVo heaven!

Did anyone else want to watch TV?

So you might be asking how anyone else watches what they want while I’m watching - my family did! So, I repeated the hack a 2^nd time – it turns out that my house has A/B cable wiring – there are two video cables running into every room in the house, so I purchased a 2^nd TiVo and repeated steps 1 – 3. The 2^nd TiVo unit sends out its signal using the ‘B’ cable of the A/B video cabling in the house. I then use an A/B cable switch or the TV’s input selector to pick which TiVo I’m watching.

There’s a special TiVo feature that solves the problem of confusing remote control commands. You can set each remote and TiVo box to work independently; it’s documented in the TiVo manual.