Over the past couple of days I’ve received the following help requests via this site’s “contact me” form. Rather than answer each of these questions with a personal email, I’ve decided to post my response here so that hopefully it will benefit somebody else. If you’d like to add anything to my response please feel free to leave a comment…

Jay wrote:

Hi, great site!  I have a question.  I have a series 3 hd tv with Verizon Fios.  When I watch HD channels (mainly shows with lots of action), i get a lot of pixelation and sound jumping.  Verizon did a line test and said my lines are fine.  Two separate verizon reps said it is the Tivo box not being able to pick up the fast verizon signal.  Do you know of any corrector that I can add to help stop the pixelation?  Its freakin annoying because I can never watch any football on any hd channel without getting annoyed.  Thanks for any help you can provide.

My response:

Have you tried testing the signal strenght of your connection?  If not, you might want to check out the following menu item on your Series 3: Messages & Settings –> Settings –> Channels –> Signal Strenght - Cable.  This will hopefully tell you whether or not your TiVo is receiving a strong signal.  For example, I am currently watching football on ESPN and my TiVo HD is indicating that it is receiving a 93 percent signal strength.

In terms of what the Verizon rep said, I honestly don’t believe it.  Your TiVo not being able to “handle the speed” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.  Go ahead and test your connection so that we can eliminate that as a potential issue.  Also, you might want to check out this thread on TCF…..

Jono wrote:

I just discovered your blog, and have learned alot already; thank you! One thing I couldn’t figure out is if it’s possible to buy a movie in iTunes and then transfer it to my TiVo Series 3. And if so, what program(s) I need.

Do you have a moment to shed some light on that?

My response:

I wish I could help you with this however, iTunes’ movies have DRM (digital rights managment) in place which tries to prevent you from watching these recordings on any device other than an iPod or from within iTunes.  That being said, I’m sure there are ways to remove this restriction however, I’m not going to recommend that you do this nor can I provide with any links since this is technically against the law (DMCA). Believe it or not, you don’t own any movie that you purchase from iTunes.  Instead, you simply are allowed to watch it in iTunes or on an iPod. Isn’t DRM great?

Is it just me or does it seem like a lot of shows on your TiVo have the CCI flag set which prevents you from transferring these shows using TiVoToGo? Lately, it seems like more and more shows have this turned on. Am I the only one experiencing this problem and is there anything I can do about it?

What else can I say? DRM really sucks!