DirecTV Series 2 Tivo + Vonage

There’s a lot of problems with getting Tivos to work with Vonage and DirecTV made it worse by disabling the USB ports, which means that we can’t hook up an Ethernet adapter. After digging around for a while I foind a combination that worked for me and my Hughes SD-DVR40 Series 2 DVR.

First, connect a DSL filter in between the DVR and the phone jack. Then go in to the configuration settings and set the dialing prefix to “,#096,12122773895”. This will make the Tivo dial out to the New York number and will force it down to 9600 bps. I didn’t bother changing my area code or dialin number because what’s in the prefix is what gets called. The test call worked and it’s got a scheduled call planned for overnight, so hopefully it will work.