Over time, I have learned some peculiarities about the TiVo system:
- When I originally used the TiVo Bolt with a couple of TiVo Minis, I had all connections over Ethernet. That worked out fine, but I did discover that the Minis did not let go of their tuners which resulted in an enormous amount of traffic over the ethernet lines. Even placing the equipment on a separate vlan only partially solved the problem.
- Early on you were able to select the TiVo button on the Minis and cause the Mini to release its hold on the TiVo Bolt tuner.
- When I had the equipment blow out due to a power surge, I opted to get the TiVo Edge. Updating the Edge and the Minis brought me into a condition in which I was unable to release the Minis from the Edge tuner. I have since learned that they changed the TiVo Minis and thus they might be able to release the tuners somehow.
- Because of the amount of traffic for the TiVos on Ethernet, I decided to run the connections over MoCA. I have a Verizon FIOS ONT that I connect to and ended up putting the Edge and the Minis on channel 15 in order to get it to work. This was acceptable and now the traffic between the Minis and the Edge are isolated from my Ethernet, or so I thought.
- Since I needed to setup the TiVo Edge as a MoCA bridge, I was surprised to learn that the Ethernet connection to the Edge was absolutely hammering the unmanaged Ethernet switch it was plugged into. This is to be expected since apparently the TiVo minis do not go directly to the TiVo Edge but actually go out the bridge, bounce off of the Ethernet switch and back to the TiVo Edge. Normally, only the port that the TiVo Edge is plugged into shows any traffic (flashing LED). Without the Ethernet switch, there would be a lot of traffic to deal with.
