Registered: Jun 2004
Location:
Posts: 3

My appologies if this question has been asked somewhere else. I did search, but was unable to find it.

My TV has no S-video input. My Tivo does. I'd like to plug my S-video cable into my Tivo in addition to the already connected RF which has never given me grief. (I'm assuming this would act as another channel, much like composite works on a VCR) This would save me from having to buy adapters, switches & stuff which I have no money for - providing it isn't a real pain in the neck to switch to the S-video input when watching TV. Is there an easy way to do this? I can't seem to find a way to add it in any of the menus.

Many Thanks,
-Dan

P.S. I have an original Tivo - the 14 hour model.

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Registered: Aug 2003
Location:
Posts: 8

I assume the device supplying your picture source has an s-video out, either a cable box or satellite box.

Adding your coax to s-video would be redundant.

Simply get ride of the coax or rca cable to your tivo and use just the s-video.

Some may say if you are using coax or rca from tivo to your tv the s-video to your tivo would be useless, however, i believe you are better off getting the best quality into your tivo so as not to reduce your picture quality even worse.

Tig 2

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Registered: Dec 2003
Location: Danbury, CT
Posts: 2568

What OP is trying to do is to use the Tivo as a switch between coax input from cable and s-video input from another device. However, no, this will not work except if you have cable and satellite. Then you can have the satellite input come in as s-video and the cable as coax. And then, only for those channels you have told the Tivo are on those services. Otherwise, there is no way to tell the Tivo which input to use.

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Registered: Jun 2004
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Posts: 3

Thanks all for the quick replies!

I have a device, we'll call it a digital camcorder* for simplicity sake, that has only an svideo out and my TV has no svideo in. So, actually I would only be using the TIVO for viewing what's on the camcorder and not recording. I thought that Tivo could help me, but it sounds like the Tivo would only work if I had satellite. I don't have satellite, so I'm not sure how the TIVO works with Satellite.

Then again, perhaps that is just too stupid and I should just spend the money for a S-video to RCA adapter that I could use with a VCR. (Have a VCR with RCA but no S-video) But, that would take money, all of which currently goes to physical therapy. (side note - drunk drivers are bad) Apologies for unnecessary rambling & thanks for reading my post.

* - For those incredibly curious, the Camcorder is actually a mod'ed Atari2600 video game output

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Registered: Oct 2001
Location: Northern Virginia
Posts: 2045

Unfortunately the TiVo won't do what you want. Even if you tricked it into thinking that it should display the svideo (without removing its ability to handle your normal TV signal at the same time), there would be two problems.

First and largest the TiVo buffers everything. This adds around a second of latency between the input video and the output video of the TiVo. Now for normal TV this usually isn't a problem, you don't care that there is a slight delay as long as everything is in sync. But for video games that delay makes them unplayable. Every button press you make is in response to something that happened a second ago.

The second issue is that the TiVo can only handle one input video stream at once, so if you were using the svideo non of your season passes would be able to record.

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Registered: Aug 2003
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Posts: 8

If all you are trying to do is get your digital camcorder to play on the tv than yes you can do it.

just change your input source on tivo from whatever it is now using to s-video and all should be good.

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Registered: Jun 2004
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Posts: 3

Gads! What an idiot I am! The delay!! Even if I did set it to use S-video, the delay would make my joyful, (interference pattern free) Atari reminiscence quite short lived! Why didn't I think of this before? If I could, I would delete this whole thread so it would no longer continue to waste space.

Many thanks all,
-Dan

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