I had an epiphany the other day about getting my TiVo to do what I want it to do when recording wish-list programs.

First, a bit of background.

My top priority in my "Season Pass" section is a wish-list for "Auto Racing". TiVo will record any sort of motor race activity ahead of anything else. This is what I want it to do.

However, since virtually every live motorsports event takes longer than the network thinks it will take, I have had to set the season pass options to record the specified program length plus an additional hour. All this works just fine, except...

There is a half-hour kids animated cartoon called "F1 Grand Prix" or some silly thing that is classified as "motor racing" and is thus picked up by my wish list. No big deal, except that sometimes it starts less than an hour and a half before a "real" motor racing program. (half an hour for the show, and the extra hour for the season pass option...) When this happens, it pre-empts the show I want to see.

A similar thing occurs with NBC's "Countdown to Green" show, a 30-minute pre-race show that goes right into the race itself. Because I have the extra hour set in the season pass option, Countdown to Green then pre-empts the motor race itself. I don't particularly want to watch the Countdown show.

So, here's what I did:

I set up specific season passes for "Countdown to Green" and the cartoon show. Not wish lists, but season passes, pointing to the specific show and TV channel. Then, I made certain that those two passes were set to the very bottom of the season pass priority list. Now, since they are seperated from the wish list motor sports recordings, they no longer share the high priority of the wish list, and the wish list recordings trump them.

It would be so much easier if TiVo just had a "negative wish list" function, so I could tell it to never record certain things...

tanstaafl.

I agree!

For some strange reason m Tivo records The Hoobs on C4 (UK) every morning. It's a kids show not unlike the Teletubbies. I don't watch kids TV, never have on this Tivo, it has 3 thumbs down etc... but it still records it, a feature where I could tell Tivo to never ever record this program would be great.

I have a S1 box being in the UK, so I'm not sure if this has been fixed in the next software or not, but another annoying thing about season passes is that if you have2 season passes boked for show that run back to back sometimes on the same channel, but you have set it to record an extra 5 mins after the show, it doesn't record the second show because it sees it as an overlap. This would be cool if the TV complany keeps the same timetable, but it would even cooler if Tivo was Smart enough to work out the 2 shows are on the same channel.

Cheer

Cris.

Have you heard of EndPad? Basically it allows you to set the end padding for all recordings as far as you want, but it does it on-the-fly, so if the padding would interfere with another scheduled recording, it won't do it.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=136658

I've been running it for six months now and it has proved to be reliable and very useful.

Marking a specific show with 3 Thumbs-Downs won't cause TiVo to skip it in a wish list? Negative wishlists would be great, but I think it would definitely confuse some users. The Thumbs-down feature seems like it's perfect for extending for a number of these negative cases. Of course it's by specific program ID. A full negative wish list could be made to work by keywords and themes as well.

Bruno

That's a pretty clever trick. I will have to try it...

I have TiVo set to record anything with Ray Charles in it. Unfortunately it insists on recording "The Nanny" as Ray had a recurring part. No number of thumbs down could kill that Zombie.

Plus it records "The Blues Brothers" at least once a week... ugh.

Thanks for the trick!

Tony, it wouldn't be the first thing the TiVo guys got wrong. And, in my educated (especially in this subject mattter) opinion, it's definitely done wrong on the TiVo. Or at least not done as well as it could be done.

The suggestions are "neat" but I turned them off because that's not how I wanted to use the box. This of course made the whole program ranking system (using thumbs) completely useless. Having a wish system without allowing exceptions is dangerous if not wasteful as has been mentioned already.

Anyway this thread pointed out a few things for me which I'll take notice of for a project I'm working on (at work).

Bruno

A friend of mine also disabled the suggestions and I still don't understand why anyone would ever want to do that. They are set so low in priority and retension that they are essentially free space. There's the chance, however slight, that it might record something you're interested in, which seems to me would be good. I've yet to see any drawback.

Yeah, I use the suggestions as sort of a live free-space-meter. If there are a bunch of suggestions on my list, that shows me how much free space I've got. If there are hardly any on the list compared to the yellow and green icons, then I know I need to start thinking about cleaning up my list.

Tony -- do you flag a lot of shows as "keep until..." or something? I never find that I need to explicitly clean up things. It seems to do a pretty good job of that on its own. I don't think I've ever missed recording anything because I had a lot of shows on there, but maybe it's just my viewing habits that keep the list small naturally?

Yeah I think I wasn't clear enough in my comment .. I should say that I DO manage my shows in that I delete them when I'm done watching, but I don't think I've ever gone in explicitly to remove unwatched shows. Maybe I AM missing a bunch of stuff and don't realize it, but I think it would only be suggestions that I would be missing, since TiVo generally tells you when it's not going to be able to record something you want. I suppose it's possible there are cases where it told me it wouldn't be able to record somethin,g but then by having the extra clear space it is then able to.

There's the chance, however slight, that it might record something you're interested in,

In my experience, at least 80% of what my TiVo records "on spec" for me is stuff I'm interested in watching.

That probably just proves I am not very discriminatory in my viewing habits.

tanstaafl.

Unfortunately, when you watch a lot of sitcoms and animated stuff, the hit rate goes way down. It decides that I'm interested in any sitcom or animated program. Even ones in Spanish. I've given every Spanish program it records three thumbs down and it just won't clue in. (And, yes, I know I could tell it that I don't get the Spanish channels, but I like to look at the pretty ladies on occasion.)

TiVo doesn't offer any type of management for the Now Playing list. Therefore, any recording that I didn't ask for is adding clutter and confusion when trying to browse the already growing list. Plus I didn't have the patience to delete recordings for a couple of weeks or months before I stopped picking up crap. Even then, a lot of the stuff I watch might make it go out and record a bunch of other stuff I really don't like. I've had a look at the Tribune data they use (and documentation) and I'm pretty sure what the basis is for their suggestions.

Bruno

I don't have a kid... And even I have a 200GB drive in my TiVo. Another thing TiVo doesn't do is multiple profiles for different viewing habits of different household members. You need multiple units, and with SAT that means multiple LNBs and more than likely a multiswitch (since it's nice to have two connections to each box).

Bruno

The "any recording that I didn't ask for" phrase would seem to negate that assumption, but I understand.

Yeah, that sort of includes both, but I though he may have been talking about just one type of recording you don't ask for

Wishing is a form of asking, right?

Like, boy I wish I had enough money laying around that I could buy an electric van this weekend.