@spence
“he took the optical audio output cable from the TV fed it from the tivo box”
makes no sense. You can’t feed an Optical output from an input.
Presumably before the change, you had the TiVo box plugged into an HDMI input on the TV, and you had the soundbar plugged into the (e)ARC HDMI input of the TV?
(This is a case where you can feed an output from an input, as the cable contains the Audio Return Channel link, which puts the TV audio out over the HDMI ARC connection in the opposite direction to the HDMI video in on that input).
So this was all fine before the Virgin update, but after that, the ARC link would work for about ten minutes, then it would stop and go back to putting the sound out just from the TV, and then it would start putting the sound out over ARC again, which involved the ten seconds audio silence while the ARC link was re-established?
And (maybe) you mean your son ‘fixed’ this by leaving the TiVo connected as before, but connecting the TV to the soundbar over Optical? Which would indeed stop the TiVo remote from controlling the volume.
So it looks like the TiVo is working OK, but the TV has become deranged regarding ARC, possibly by something to do with the TiVo update, possibly just by coincidence.
Put things back how they were, Factory Reset the TV, re-establish any settings you had before that the Reset has removed, and see if that fixes the problem with the ARC only lasting ten minutes or not.
As if the TiVo was causing this, it would be causing a similar issue over Optical, losing the audio every ten minutes, but it isn’t doing that.
My favourite bedtime reading is a Sony product manual…
