I’m a big Tivo fan, so it was with more than a little dismay that I was getting ready to trim our Christmas tree a few weeks ago and I could no longer play MP3’s through Tivo on my home theater. The Grinch had apparently just nested in my Tivo.

What was very strange though, is that I could completely navigate through my MP3 collection, via any one of the services I run (Tivo Desktop, Galleon, and J River Media Center). But when I’d select to play a track, Tivo would show the “Playing” screen and get stuck at the 0 position. It’d never actually play anything, though in all other respects, it was working perfectly.

Reset Media Center. No dice.

Reset Galleon. Still no dice.

Reset the Tivo. Ack. You get the picture.

I gave up after spending about 2 hours on it and decided that both the Tivo and me needed a little cooling off period.

I was starting to think that maybe a Tivo firmware update (one of those “happen automagically in the middle of the night” upgrades) was responsible. Anyway, after some research and a posting on the Tivo forums, someone suggested actually hard-rebooting the Tivo. Apparently, the mp3 subsystem can get hosed every once in a while.

I’d never had that happen, and I was always under the impression that resetting the Tivo via the menus was the same as an “Unplug it, and plug it back in” reboot, but, what the hey.

Lo and behold, it worked! Media Center, Galleon and the Tivo Desktop can all play MP3’s again. I guess there might be some traction in the old tech support saw “Have you rebooted the machine?” after all<g>.

At any rate, it’s a Merry Christmas again!

And have great New Year!