Tivo fucking sucks

The BBQ Pit
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Yep. You heard me right. Tivo. The wonderful device that everyone loves. There are probably dozens of threads full of posters gushing over the wonder and awe in which they hold their Tivo’s in Cafe Society and IMHO. I’m sorry, folks, I really am. But, Tivo fucking sucks.

Now, lets get one thing straight here: I’m a big fan of DVR technology. Recording TV is great. Once you get a Tivo, Replay TV, Dish Network DVR, or whatever you cannot go back to regular TV that doesn’t meet your unique schedule.

My problem is with the software in this Tivo unit. This thing is the most poorly designed, thoughtless, user unfriendly, counter-intuitive pile of mammoth dung that I’ve ever tried to deal with! In a classic example of over engineered software, this thing tries to do everything for you. I can’t simply say “record what’s on channel 7 at 10 PM Wednesday.” No, that would be much too hard for me to figure out. Instead, everthing is recorded by show. I must say “record Law and Order”. Then what I get is every single episode of Law and Order, on all fucking channels. That’s five episodes every single day!

So, even if I devote ten hours (that’s over 10 percent) of my hard drive to Law and Order, it will be filled up with old repeats from TNT within two days. Then next week’s new episode will not be recorded because the alloted space will be full. This alone would make the Tivo more useless than an udder on a star destroyer, but the stupidity doesn’t stop there. At least that would be an easy fix, which I might get someday with a software upgrade. Further, my Tivo records the same episodes over and over again. I tell it to record the O’Reilly factor. I specifically check off the option for “first run only”, whatever that means. It now records O’Reilly when he’s on at 8 PM on FNC. Great. That’s what I wanted. But then it records him again at 11 PM when the repeat the same broadcast. Then it records him again at 3 AM when it repeats again. So, within three days my ten hours alloted to O’Reilly are full. Then the fucking useless piece of shit Tivo simply stops recording the show altogether! What. The. Fuck. At least keep recording it and just overwrite the old episodes, so that I would always have a current show to watch. Even though this would be tripling the amount of storage, at least it would have some small amount of use to me.

Direct TV and Tivo: Suck it the fuck up and hire some systems analysts and software engineers who are more than two years out of college. Have them write software that doesn’t fucking blow chunks that I can download onto my Tivo. It’s hardly too much to ask that I be able to record new shows, pick which channels I want to record, and be able to override the mind numbingly stupid automatic features of your “season pass” options. If I want, I should be able to choose to simply record whatever is on a given channel at a given time, no questions asked. You’ve fallen for the oldest of development tricks: You think your software is smarter than your end users. Fuck you and the cat5 cable you rode in on.

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Perhaps the DirectTiVo units have different software, but there’s an option “Record by time or channel” in the menu for recording shows on my Series 2 stand-alone.

The TiVo only has information for shows that the networks provide. If the networks provide the show’s description and ID, then the software will work correctly when you tell it to record new episodes only. If the TiVo doesn’t have the information for any of those episodes, it can’t tell what is new and what is not, so it records them all. Maybe it’s TiVo’s fault for not obtaining this information, but I don’t know what kind of deal they have with the networks there.

My TiVo seems to function differently than yours when it comes to deleting shows when space is needed. Most shows I record are set to delete when space is needed. If I Record 20 episodes of Shitcom, and the TiVo is low on space , it will delete old episodes, and record newer ones. Are you telling your TiVo to “Keep Until I Delete” O’Reilley?

I thought that DirectTiVo’s had almost identical software to stand-alone TiVo’s… Am I wrong about that?

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  1. Open Tivo menu
  2. Choose “Pick Programs to Record”
  3. Choose “Record by Time or Channel”
  4. Choose “Manually Record Time/Channel”
  5. Pick start time, stop time, days of week and channel
  6. Press the select button to finish

I’m not sure whether it’s Tivo’s fault, or the cable company’s fault (if they don’t send enough distinguishing information down the wire), but Tivo doesn’t seem to do a great job of picking out first-run Daily Shows for me lately. Sometimes it manages, but more often I get 5 a day. Like you, I should switch it to manual record.

Of course, manual recording is also quite nice for catching interesting segments of shows (e.g. First 35 minutes of the Monday night Tonight show = freshest monologue of the week + headlines).

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You sure you don’t have some extra season passes in there?

When I tell my TiVo to get a season pass for something, and specify “first run only”, I only get the new episodes. I’ve never gotten the same show recorded twice.

It’s even smart enough that if I have two things that would normally be recorded at the same time, it finds the “encore” setting and records that. Thus, I get both “Nova” and the new foody show “No Reservations” because it was smart enough to figure out that even though both show at 10pm, the Nova is rebroadcast at 5am and it picks up that one.

er… I’m pretty sure that when I choose a season pass, it prompts me for a channel. I had to put in two season passes to get both the latest & greatest Law and Order (on NBC or whatever) AND the repeats on TNT. In fact, the only thing I can think of that would cause the problems you describe is if you had multiple season passes for the same show. Check your Season Pass manager.

1 - yes, you can. There’s a “Record by time and channel” somewhere in the menu tree.
2 - The whole point of TiVo is that you don’t have to do that! Get a VCR if that’s what you want.

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What they said about the manual recording. Also, it’s not Tivo’s fault that the networks don’t always provide episode information, which is how it knows whether it’s new or not. RTFM, and stop blaming the Tivo for your illiteracy.

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Isn’t there a “guide” button on your TiVo? This is how I would do it on my TiVo:
[ul]
[li]Press guide[/li][li]Scroll to channel 7, press Enter (or was it Select? The middle button.)[/li][li]Scroll down to Wednesday 10pm. Notice it says “Law and Order”.[/li][li]Press Enter[/li][/ul]
That’s it. Just that one episode gets recorded. Admittedly the scrolling is a bit slow, but it’s simple and user-friendly.

Also, mine has always deleted the oldest shows to make room for new ones. Except the ones I mark as “keep until I delete”, of course.

My TiVo unit is a Toshiba with a built-in DVD player, but it’s still a genuine TiVo. I’d be surprised if your software were very different from mine.

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I’m skeptical that this exists on my Tivo. Just FTR, I have one that came with Direct TV, so maybe they are different than stand alones? I’ll look through the menu’s more tonight and see if I can find this. It’s certainly not an option when you go to record a show, and this is where I would expect it to be.

Uh, no. The whole point of Tivo is to record shows with a hard drive and not have to deal with tapes. I should be able to record any way I want with any DVR. The dish network DVR I had previously was able to do this with ease. When you went to record, this option was there. With Tivo it is not.

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Yes, this would work. But, this only records one show. I want to record only the new episode of Law and Order every week at 10 PM on Wednesday.

Do you really go in every week and re-pick all of your shows?

I’m not using keep until I delete. I’m using the “keep at most 10 episodes” and “delete to save space” options. I’m certain of this. It records 10, then stops recording!

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I’ve printed meara’s instructions. (I don’t have internet at home presently.) I’ll give them a shot, but I do not ever recall seeing a “Record by Time or Channel” or “Manually Record Time/Channel” options.

If they do exist on my Tivo, why aren’t these options available when I select a program from the guide to record? Why would they be hidden in some menu?

Oh, and I have read the manual you snotty fuck.

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Oh. You didn’t say “every Wednesay” in your OP. If you want a recurring recording, I think you need to use the Season Pass.

I think your Season Pass settings are wrong (or at least sub-optimal). Mine only picks up the Simpsons episodes on one channel. IIRC, when I first set up the season pass, there were multiple Simpsons series to choose from, each corresponding to a different channel. Is there any chance it’s set up to look for all shows with the words “Law and Order” in the title, rather than a specific series on a specific channel? (I can’t remember if that’s even possible, but it sounds like that’s what it’s doing.)

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Because if you’ve already chosen a program, it assumes that you know what program you want to record.

If your menus are the same as mine, go to the main menu. Scroll down to “Pick programs to record.” You’ll have options like search by title, search by wishlist, etc. One of the options should be “record by time or channel” or something like that. Then you set it up like a VCR.

I think my season passes are channel specific, but if they aren’t, I think there’s still a workaround. I’ll have to look at it.

I was having trouble with one program that Tivo kept saying I had already seen brand new episodes so it would record them. So, I set that program on “record all.” Once every two weeks, I went in an deleted anything fishy. That works for someone like me, because I love to fiddle with the Tivo anyway.

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My Tivo just doesn’t have these options that you are talking about. The season pass is for every channel. I haven’t seen anything that would allow you to limit it to a single channel. Maybe it exists buried in another menu somewhere, but it’s definately not in the options when you are setting the season pass up.

Nope. I haven’t played around with the options to search for words yet at all.

It sounds as if I just have a shitty Tivo. Maybe the Direct TV Tivo’s aren’t the same operating system as others?

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?

I don’t follow you. I do know which program I want to record. It’s just not allowing me to do it without recording too much junk. If there is a way to limit by time or channel, then it should be available when I’m setting up the recording. Why it would not be is unfathomable to me. Why hide the features I need in some menu?

I’m hoping this will be the solution. I’ll let you know once I’ve taken a look at these menu options.

Mine definately are not channel specific. Also, I’m certain that there is no option to change this in the menu’s that I’ve looked at. (The season pass manager screen.) Maybe it’s hidden somewhere else?

Ya, there will always be some manual intervention required with DVR’s, no matter how good the software is. My Dish Network DVR worked well, but I did need to go and clean it up regularly. It wasn’t smart enough to delete old programs at all the way Tivo does. However, I didn’t mind that because at least it recorded what I wanted it to.

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Because once you click on “Magnum, p.i.” TiVo thinks you want to watch it. Why would it offer you the possibilty to screw up the recording process? Generally speaking, once you click on the program, TiVo thinks that it understands what you want, which is that program, not that block of time. They are trying to make it impossible for you to inadvertently NOT record the program you want. How to do that? Limit the options available on that screen.

Remember, TiVo is attempting to be idiot-proof. See the program. Click the program. The idea is that the program will be recorded no matter when it occurs, or how it gets shuffled around in the schedule, so that you don’t have to pay attention to that. And it works for the majority of users the majority of times.

But there are always outliers, you outlier you. :slight_smile:

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We have a DirecTV Tivo and the Season Pass works as described by the other posters. We also have a “Record by Date and Time” option.

Haj

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Anybody who claims “Tivo fucking sucks” should be banned. And I don’t just mean from SDMB.

Yes, I’m kidding, of course

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I have DirecTV but I’m not a TiVo user. A few months ago I looked into getting a TiVo. One TiVo feature that seemed very useful to me was using a wireless USB card that would download programming over my WiFi system several times a day rather than over a phone line once per day. I don’t have phone lines connected to my DirecTV receivers.

It turned out that only the newer stand-alone TiVo units had that feature. The DirecTV Tivo’s did not. So it seems that at least some of the OP’s rage should be directed at DirecTV for using the earlier version of TiVo and not upgrading when the stand alone units did.

(Another advantage of the USB wireless feature was remote programming over the internet. I think that’s available with the dial-up-once-a-day units, but of course the changes don’t take effect until the unit dials in.)

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It’s completely baffling to me why you’re unable to program your Tivo to only record one instance of a particular episode of a show, because I certainly can. I have several season passes that come to mind right off; Nip/Tuck, Fawlty Towers and Sensible Chic. Nip/Tuck and Sensible Chic are constantly regurgitating the exact same episodes over and over and over on various days, at various times. Yet my Tivo season pass doesn’t record an episode if it sees that I already have it recorded. And we managed to miss 3 or 4 episodes of FT the first time we saw it was on and set up the season pass, but when it started again in the network’s rotation, it only recorded the 3 or 4 missing eps, without recapturing any of the ones we still had in the folder. I can’t tell you what settings we’ve programmed that make this work because I’m not home near my unit, but if no one else posts how to accomplish this before then, I’ll check when I get home.

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You think you’ve got it bad, try using one of these cheap, knock-off “MOXI” DVR units (aka NoT-a-TiVo) that you get with Adelphia’s cable service. Its “Record Series” function (same as TiVo’s “Season Pass”, in theory) is worse than useless, it doesn’t even work! It will record some airings of a show but not others, it will record some programs TWICE, but most commonly it will merely crash the unit altogether. Combine this with the fact that Adelphia has fucked up my channel listings and hasn’t seen fit to fix it for FIVE FUCKING MONTHS and I’ve gotta get creative by taping “Cooking With Bobby Flay” if I want the new episode of “Mythbusters”. And on channels which don’t have ANY program information at all (which applies to several) then forget it, it won’t record a damn thing, period! So much for recording those old Dave Letterman shows on the Trio Channel…

Cocksucking Baby-Raping Adelphia, the Al-Qaeda of cable networks…didn’t they go bankrupt when their old fart CEO stole everyone’s pension fund? WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY EVEN STILL AROUND??? (And every time I look at those stupid trees outside my balcony which prevent me from upgrading to satellite service, I can’t help but wonder if a box of copper nails will do the trick…)

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Whoohoo! That’s what I love about the pit. :smiley: