When you go into the setup menu of the DirecTivo unit, and go into the "Channels You Receive" list and punch in which channels you don't get...

If the power goes out, is that information lost? Or does it survive a power loss?

I'm not going to get into the side discussion of how irritating it is that I have to do this at all. The thing should just know which channels I get already, without me having to manually intervene and tell it which ones I don't get. And DirecTV changes their channel lineup every time the mood strikes them, so you have to go in and do it again..

Oh wait, I said I wasn't going to get into that discussion...

I would hope it does. Otherwise it would be one more point that makes my ReplayTV the better choice (for me, anyway). I have had to delete some channels from the Channel Guide on my ReplayTV, because the service only provides general listings for my area's cable system - either Digital or Analog. And those changes have survived power losses. Several, in fact.

From what I gather out of more than one Replay vs. TiVo discussion over at AVSForum, it seems that any user changes on either unit should stick. Unless of course, you performed the necessary procedure for a factory reset.

The ``Channels I Receive'' settings are definitely saved though a power outage. Although I agree that it should be able to figure it out on its own, even if I then want to modify it to take out the Spanish channels, sports channels, Pay-Per-Views, etc.

It saves the list in the MFS partition on the hard disk so it should survive power loss. Pretty much everything is kept on the HD.

The UK series 1 TiVo gets channel listing updates every so often automatically. I get messages about so and so channel being deleted and so and so being added.

The US S1 TiVos got those, too. When it first started out, I'd get huge lists every day. It was really annoying. I haven't seen one since I got my S2 DirecTiVo, though.

I don't think it has to do with the Tivo Series. It isn't clear in your post whether that was what you were implying.

My local cable provider changes listings every once and a while. The biggest was when Fox moved from 43 to 11 (yet the station IDs still say Fox 43).

Anyway, I've never lost my "Channels You Recieve" lists. I had my Tivo set up with at my parents' house over the summer. They have the most frequent power outages I've ever heard of. One day the power went out for 1 second, turned back on for 2 seconds, then repeated that for about a minute. By the time I got to my Tivo it was over, but nothing was wrong with it.

I have never seen that on my DirecTiVos (Series 1). Perhaps this is only a stand-alone thing.

AOL on the 'channels you receive' surviving a power loss.

Yeah. It's probably an SA/Direct-thing, but I was just being clear on what I have had and not drawing conclusions.

Cool, cool. Perhaps the S1/DTivos handle it differently. I mean, channel lineup changes do happen, so your S2 must know about it. Perhaps it just doesn't shove the fact in your face

I know that when I get the message, I've always been like,"Well, whoop-dee-dah." Most of the time it's been cable-access channels anyway, the ones I mean to remove from the "Channels You Receive" lineup

Same here. The UK TiVo's are all series 1 and we've got a UK specific version of the 2.5.5 software.

Well, the way I see it, the unit is CAPABLE of getting signal on any channel that is being broadcast. In other words, I don't subscribe to any of the sports packages. So on channels 700-801, I have like 70 channels that all say "You must cal 304-xxxx to subscribe to this service." While my TV and VCR DO both auto-recognise channels I recieve, it would grab those since it's actively seeing a channel and not just static. At least the Tivo removes the channels you don't recieve from the guide. My digital cable box didn't. God was that irritating.

Oh, and yes, it definitely keeps the list over a power outage. Too bad the select-play-select-3-0-select doesn't stay. I LOVE that feature, and so does the wife. Too bad she can never seem to remember the sequence whenever the power fails.

I think the main gripe is with DireTivo models because they could be beemed your subscription information along with the program guide (in fact, it must be sent this information or else you could watch any channel you choose).

I have never seen that on my DirecTiVos (Series 1). Perhaps this is only a stand-alone thing

It's happened to my DirecTiVo1 quite a few times, but not recently. I always thought it seemed to correspond with a software upgrade.

On my series 1 DTiVo, it definitely keeps the guide information around after reboots. The lossage I've seen when new channels show up or upgrades happen is annoying, but seems to be a property of DirecTV itself. Years ago, when I had DirecTV without TiVo, it had the same exact behavior of resurrecting channels you'd rather stay dead.

Most recent Dish Network receivers have an automaticially created "Channels I get" list. Came in quite handy when I mirrored it to the ReplayTV unit.

Didn't know DirectTV moves channels around. Dish, I think 99% of the channels that I subscribed to in 1999 are still at their same channel numbers. Dish left quite a few channel gaps in their setup to be able to do this.

On the series I TiVo, it ended up being a lot of the event-based sports channels, and then channels would change names for no reason, and I imagine that was a Tribune Media Services glitch. One of the software updates seemed to have at least filtered those out, though. For the last year or so I had my SI, I don't remember much at all along those lines.

Well, that's good to know. My experience with DirecTV constantly changing the channel lineup is about three years old now. But back then, the channels would shuffle once every couple of months. Then I switched to C-band for a few years before getting the Tivo just recently. So perhaps they've settled down into a stable channel lineup now that they're spread across three birds.