One problem with TiVo is that I’m so used to just watching recorded programs that I never see anything but the ones I set up to record. FYI, I turned off the thingy on the TiVo that tries to guess what I like after it kept recording the 700 Club and stupid sitcoms.
So given that I have the following being recorded, what else would I like?
~Normal Viewing~
Law & Order
West Wing
Nova
Frontline
American Experience
Saturday Night Live
~Light stuff that’s easy to watch while I sweat away on the spin bike~
Oprah
Jeopardy
Letterman
Drawn Together
No!! Don’t turn off the Tivo picks! They don’t take space from anything else and then you can thumbdown anything it picks you don’t like. Triple thumb down any crap and one or two up the stuff you like.
We got a new one and are still training it. If I have a few minutes, I browse by title and thumb up or down shows, picking a few to record. Eventually the Tivo picks will get better. We saw Kiss me, Guido and other shows we never knew we loved until we saw them as picks.
Another vote for leaving TiVo’s automated recording thingy on… Yes, it’ll start recording random crap all over the place at first, but after you train it, you’ll find it starts picking up shows that you like. Mine has been especially good at grabbing “oh, I forgot about that show!” shows that I wouldn’t have thought to add a Season Pass for, but it’s nice to have on the TiVo as fluff to watch during dinner/working out/etc. The Drew Carey Show comes to mind.
Well, um, I have the auto-picks turned on for TiVo #2, and it has yet to pick up anything I’d really like to watch.
TiVo #1, the main TiVo, is so full of Nova that we haven’t watched yet (and don’t want to delete) that it can hardly keep up with what we want to record, much less pick up extras. But really, unless TiVo#2 starts picking up better stuff, I’m loathe to turn on auto-picks on TiVo#1. Thus this thread.
See, this is what I need help with. There ARE no “Oh, I forgot about that show!” shows for me, since I never turn on the TV unless it’s to watch a DVD or TiVo’d show, I fast forward through all commercials (thus am not privy to ads for new shows), and I pretty much never read, listen, or watch any sort of media that includes stuff about new TV shows.
I hate to admit it, but the Straight Dope is where I get 99% of my pop culture information. I’m a TV loser. I’m just not willing to sit through a whole show unless someone I trust (like, the whole SDMB community ) tells me it’s worth watching.
But the cost is essentially zero. Why turn it off?
You just have to spend half an hour rating things. Any show you like, give it 2 or 3 thumbs. If you like old movies like I do, scroll thru the TCM program listing for a few days and give stuff that sounds interesting a thumb. And then thumb down The 700 Club and you won’t see it again.
I’ve had my TiVo for almost exactly one year (I got it last Christmas and waited a week to hook it up), and I agree that you should turn the Suggestions back on. You’ll need to spend a month or two going through the Suggestions and thumbs-upping and -downing stuff, until you have the machine trained; eventually it’ll start to figure you out and zero in on your preferences. It takes time and effort, but it does pay off. My Suggestions are almost all scientific, historical, and anthropological documentary shows now. It’s very cool.
The other reason to have Suggestions turned on is space management. There’s nothing in the TiVo menus that tells you what percentage of the hard drive is full and how much space you have left. The Suggestions serve this purpose; if in Now Playing you have three pages of your own stuff, and two pages of Suggestions, you have a rough guideline of how much room is available to record. When you get down to a page of Suggestions, you know space is starting to get tight, and it’s time to start deleting stuff. If you have no Suggestions, you will be surprised when the yellow-dot programs begin disappearing off the bottom of the list.
Oh, and one other idea to help make the Suggestions better: Go through your channel listing and turn off the channels you never ever watch and never ever want to get Suggestions from. I’ve turned off most of the international-language channels (my TiVo was recording a lot of Korean shows out of the gate, which was odd), as well as the shopping networks, the Jesus-TV channels, the high-def channels, and that sort of thing, with the Golf network and a couple of others for good measure. If you make those channels unavailable, you’ll never get Suggestions recorded from them.
Like others have said, you have to take a little time and tell it what you do and do not like. After a few sessions of this its picks will improve dramatically. You’ll still get seemingly wierd stuff but you’ll also get a couple good ‘hits’ now and then.
I’ve been ‘turned on to’ the following by my TiVo:
[ul][li]Sports Night[/li][li]The Ernie Kovacs Show[/li][li]Pilot Season[/li][li]Hey Monie[/li][li]Behind the Music That Sucks[/li][/ul]
My problem is I record a lot of adult animated shows like South Park, Venture Bros, ATHF, Daria etc. as well as kid/adult stuff like Samurai Jack, Dextor’s Lab etc. So it still occasionally thinks I’ll like ToonDisney and Nickelodeon kid shows.
I’ve also had that problem, Hail. The engine’s not foolproof, but my TiVo Suggestions turned me on to both Buffy and Sports Night, so it holds a cherished place in my memory.
OK, is there anyone who can give me suggestions on shows, as opposed to just telling me to turn on the TiVo suggestions?
Honestly, I highly doubt the TiVo auto thing will work for me. Firstly, even though they’re on for TiVo#2, I checked last night, and there was a grand total of one TiVo suggested show. TiVo#2 is by far the lesser used TiVo; given that it’s so full that it only recorded one auto-record show, I highly doubt that TiVo #1 will automatically record anything at all. It’s so full that I have to go through and save/delete things manually most of the time to avoid losing shows I want to watch. I’m a TiVo saver, I guess. Like I said, I have probably 20 hours of Novas that I want to watch that I never get around to.
Second, even if it did auto-record things, I don’t want to watch some random show just to see if I like it. I don’t have time for that. I’d rather pick what I want to watch and watch it.
So back to the OP - can anyone suggest some nifty TV shows that I might like?
) tells me it’s worth watching.