Xobni causing Tivo Desktop to fail

[kilroy99]

Greetings,

I have been using Xobni for a few months now, am also a TiVO user. Have the Tivo Desktop 2.5.1 installed on my PC. I never really put 2& 2 together till last night.

On my desktop PC, tivo desktop was running smoothly for several months, and I never had a problem with downloading recordings from my TiVO box.
I installed Xobni, and shortly after that it stopped the beacon service from running.

I never thought anything of it till last night - I had tivo desktop running, and able to download using my laptop (vista) installed Office on the laptop, and all was working fine. Installed Xobni, rebooted - and the TiVO beacon service was not allowed to run.
I un-installed Xobni, and lo and behold - the TivO beacon service started up and ran without problems.

I have not yet removed Xobni from my main workstation, but I suspect that I will get a similar result (it will allow TiVO to work).

Thank you

[ryan]

Hi kilroy,

This is a known issue that we're working on. I find it quite strange that we're somehow interfering with the Tivo beacon service, but you can't fight reality! In any case, it's on our list of things to investigate / fix.

-Ryan

[kilroy99]

Ryan - Thank you for your reply.

Please keep us/me posted, because I will have to un-install Xobni on my desktop machine, purely because it has more hard drive space than my laptop.

THanks

Andrew

[bmoura]

Hi kilroy,

This is a known issue that we're working on. I find it quite strange that we're somehow interfering with the Tivo beacon service, but you can't fight reality! In any case, it's on our list of things to investigate / fix.

-Ryan

Wow, that's a problem. Definitely one to fix.

[bmoura]

I see that Tivo Desktop 2.6 is available today. Is the Xobni problem still unresolved ?

[kilroy99]

Sorry it took so long to reply back to this topic.

As of last night - 4/6/08 - Fresh install of tivo desktop 2.6

and the latest xobni - It still appears to kill the Tivo Beacon service.

Sadly - as much as I hate to do so - Xobni must come off again.

Please let us know when you got this bug nailed - and I will happilly become a Xobni evangalist - cause it really did make a big difference.

Andrew

[kilroy99]

Greetings -
I see that the Final release has been made available - has the Tivo Problem that I documented been taken care of yet?

Thanks
Andrew

[jeffh]

Wow, this one has been driving me crazy all week. I really like Xobni, but Tivodesktop is a lot more important. I will watch to see if this gets fixed so I can reload, but for now I have to uninstall.

[greg]

Hi,

I came up with a fix for this today.

Run the reg file in the attached zip to make the TiVo beacon service able to start again (make sure Xobni is installed before you do this). We'll also be pushing out an update and a new installer with this change built in.

It turns out that the TiVo beacon service was traversing all keys in the Windows Uninstall registry key (where Windows stores uninstaller information for all the software you have on your machine). An invalid DisplayIcon for our uninstaller was causing it to crash during this process.

Interesting!

Thanks for your patience,

Greg Duffy
Principal Software Engineer
Xobni

[BillPStudios]

Greg,

You've done it!

There's absolutely no reason I can imagine why TiVo beacon is even parsing the Uninstall registry but you've nailed it. Correcting the DisplayIcon type resolves the problem. As a fellow developer I'm impressed at your ability to find this bizarre condition. As a TiVo addict I'm grateful for your persistance.

I will be happy to continue my use and promotion of your fantastic Xobni program.

Bill Pytlovany
BillP Studios

[jeffh]

Great news!

Many thanks.

[jspiro]

Unbelievable! It's fixed here too. Too bad that I left for a trip without some eps of Hell's Kitchen to take, but I'm happy again :)

You may want to ping the xobni and tivo communities to let them know about this issue, I bet a lot of people are scratching their heads, and I barely found this thread.

Cheers for that tricky find!
Jono

[traveler]

I too am having a problem with my TIVO desktop not working, however it's unrelated to the Xobni program. I was hoping you could elaborate on the above issue as mine appears to be related to windows SP3 update. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[tyler]

@ traveler:

In fixing the issue on our end, we found some interesting behavior that the Tivo software was doing...basically scanning the registry constantly, and failing if it found something it didn't like. We were rather surprised, and have no idea why they would be doing this.

My suggestion would have to be to ask Tivo if that has changed as of XP SP3, or maybe why they would be doing that in the first place. That said, I have no real knowledge of Tivo software, so the problem could come from almost any incompatibility.

Hope that helps!