Chefelf.com Night Life: My New HD TiVo - Chefelf.com Night Life

Jump to content

Page 1 of 1

My New HD TiVo Monday, November 12, 2007

#1 User is offline   Chefelf Icon

  • LittleHorse Fan
  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Admin
  • Posts: 4,528
  • Joined: 30-October 03
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:New York, NY
  • Country:United States

Posted 12 November 2007 - 10:02 PM

My New HD TiVo

I've had my TiVo up and running for about five days now. Overall I'm pretty happy with it. My ReplayTV died about a month ago after four years of faithful service. Unable to resurrect it I was forced to purchase a new DVR. What I chose was the TiVo TCD652160 HD. There weren't really any other choices. ReplayTV has been all but driven out of the market in recent years, completely abandoning their DVR hardware in favor of a solely software-based approach leaving TiVo with a pretty solid control of the DVR market. (Please save all your emails about MythTV, etc.)

Overall I'm pretty impressed with the amount of DVR progress that has occurred between the release of my ReplayTV 5504 and my newly acquired TiVo. I do miss the simplicity of my ReplayTV since TiVo tends to be a bit overcomplicated in spots. I've got a few gripes with my new TiVo (naturally) and I'd like to get them off my chest.

TiVo Suggestions

Suggestions sound like a good idea. In theory your TiVo looks at what you are recording and begins recording things that are similar. The problem is that I never had any shortage of things to watch on my old ReplayTV. After setting the same channels up on my TiVo that seemed adequate.

About a day or two later I noticed that my TiVo was constantly recording two channels simultaneously. It was to the point where I could no longer change the channel because something was always recording. When I found the hidden collection of recordings what I saw was the worst assortment of television possible. Somehow, after I told my TiVo to record The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Heroes, 30 Rock and Scrubs my TiVo figured that it had enough information and then lined up the following for me:

  • The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer
  • Hannah Montana
  • Dr. Phil
  • Sabrina, the Teenage Witch
  • Full House
  • Access Hollywood
  • Drake & Josh
  • The Martha Stewart Show
  • Montel Williams
  • Live With Regis and Kelly
  • The Fresh Prince of Bel Air
  • Frasier


Don't get me wrong, there are a few things on that list that I wouldn't mind watching. However, could you possibly construct a more broad sampling of television? It's like my TiVo watched me select my three or four shows then said, "Hey, are you someone that likes to watch television? Great! We've got a few hundred shows for you!"

I'm sure that over time rating these suggestions they would begin to improve but I was not willing to leave this nuisance of a feature on long enough to find out.

No Commercial Skip

The ReplayTV had a button that fast forwarded exactly 30 seconds. It's no surprise that TiVo got rid of this feature. They have a feature that lets you rewind a few seconds but no ability to skip over advertisements with greater ease. So now you have to manually fast forward which would have been fine if the commercial skip feature had never been invented.

Season Pass

I've got to say that the Season Pass feature sucks. It sounds like a great idea until you consider that there are precious few shows on TV that only play once a week. So what happens is you record every episode of that show that airs. Ever. Try setting up a Season Pass for The Daily Show and you record something like six episodes a day, all identical. You can refine it to pick first run only but what if you want to record it only on a specific channel? Or a specific time? There is really no easy way of doing this that I've found short of setting up a manual recording. That involves finding out the air time and channel of a specific show and manually entering in the information. On my ancient ReplayTV I could simply select a show and press the record button twice to do the same thing. Not being able to do this easily directly from the guide seems like a huge oversight.

I'm still a bit new so maybe I'm missing something here but it seems like quite a bit of work to achieve something simple that everyone is going to try to use.

Ads

Something at the bottom of my main menu screen read "$$ Save Money with Jenny Craig". Apparently TiVo feeds poorly targeted advertisements straight to your TiVo. And you can't even remove them. Imagine that. Call me old fashioned, but after laying out $300 for the TiVo and paying a monthly subscription fee on top of that I think the least I deserve is the ability to remove the ad from my main menu screen. It makes me almost respect them for how bold a move this is.
See Chefelf in a Movie! -> The People vs. George Lucas

Buy the New LittleHorse CD, Strangers in the Valley!
CD Baby | iTunes | LittleHorse - Flight of the Bumblebee Video

Chefelf on: Twitter | friendfeed | Jaiku | Bitstrips | Muxtape | Mento | MySpace | Flickr | YouTube | LibraryThing
0

#2 User is offline   Deepsycher Icon

  • Giantness of Heart
  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Former Members
  • Posts: 6,220
  • Joined: 22-December 05
  • Country:Nothing Selected

Posted 12 November 2007 - 10:19 PM

I was thinking of buying a Panasonic hard disk recorder with a dvd recorder but I am not happy about the upscaling feature. If decide to go onto a subscription service I don't want to miss out picture detail.

This post has been edited by Deepsycher: 12 November 2007 - 10:20 PM

0

#3 User is offline   srmoore Icon

  • Level Boss
  • PipPipPip
  • Group: Redcloud Collective
  • Posts: 352
  • Joined: 02-November 03
  • Location:Boston.. sortof
  • Country:Nothing Selected

Posted 16 November 2007 - 05:24 PM

I only skimmed the post, I'm tired and didn't feel like fully reading, but thought I'd throw in a few comments anyway biggrin.gif

So I found that you have to thumbs down a few things before the Tivo starts to give relevant suggestions. The more data they have the better they can suggest. Granted my roommate and I shared one at one point (before we parted ways that is...) and it would come up with stuff like "The history of porn" on the history channel. (seriously.. parts 1 and 2)

They also had some way of pushing buttons on the remote so that you could change one of the buttons to be a jump forward button. (Here is a link - Tivo 30 second skip)

I'm not sure this works with the new HD tivo.. or if it even has a new version of the remote.

Anyway. Hope all is well!
0

#4 User is offline   Chefelf Icon

  • LittleHorse Fan
  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Admin
  • Posts: 4,528
  • Joined: 30-October 03
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:New York, NY
  • Country:United States

Posted 16 November 2007 - 08:27 PM

Holy crap! Thanks, Steve. That works perfectly!

While watching a recording just press "Select" "Play" "Select" "3" "0" "Select" on your remote.

Doing that once enables the 30 second skip on the button that has an arrow on it (right under the fast-forward button). That button normallyl skips to the end or beginning of a recording.

Maybe I'll enable the suggestions again and just start ranking things.
See Chefelf in a Movie! -> The People vs. George Lucas

Buy the New LittleHorse CD, Strangers in the Valley!
CD Baby | iTunes | LittleHorse - Flight of the Bumblebee Video

Chefelf on: Twitter | friendfeed | Jaiku | Bitstrips | Muxtape | Mento | MySpace | Flickr | YouTube | LibraryThing
0

#5 User is offline   Sailor Abbey Icon

  • Queen of the Harpies
  • PipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Members
  • Posts: 2,122
  • Joined: 29-March 05
  • Gender:Female
  • Location:the land of Huskies
  • Interests:Defending the forces of evil from the whiney forces of good; spreading awareness about violence and its ability to solve all problems - from the very smallest to the very stupid…est…; sticking up for the little guy, as long as the little guy shares my point of view or is willing to convert in exchange for some ‘sticking up for’; and of course, plotting world domination and putting and end to reality tv once and for all. <br /><br />Oh, and beautiful women.
  • Country:United States

Posted 25 November 2007 - 07:44 AM

Everybody’s fraking got Tivo but me. I think I’m going to have to cave this week.
0

#6 User is offline   Deepsycher Icon

  • Giantness of Heart
  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Former Members
  • Posts: 6,220
  • Joined: 22-December 05
  • Country:Nothing Selected

Posted 25 November 2007 - 07:59 AM

Everybody? Not me.

I record films from a television tuner, then I have to filter out the adverts manually.

Another annoying feature, I noticed recently on advert supported television in my place, they are sticking those annoying channel logos, at the top of the screen again. (I know what channel it is already. If I don't know, there are plenty of easy ways to find out (without disrupting an entire film with it), like on the menu or a news paper. It isn't diffcult, instead they ruin everybody's vision with their logo, just to tell what channel it is. Then it gets stuck to the recording, so it isn't worth filtering and keeping.

This post has been edited by Deepsycher: 25 November 2007 - 08:00 AM

0

#7 User is offline   Sailor Abbey Icon

  • Queen of the Harpies
  • PipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Members
  • Posts: 2,122
  • Joined: 29-March 05
  • Gender:Female
  • Location:the land of Huskies
  • Interests:Defending the forces of evil from the whiney forces of good; spreading awareness about violence and its ability to solve all problems - from the very smallest to the very stupid…est…; sticking up for the little guy, as long as the little guy shares my point of view or is willing to convert in exchange for some ‘sticking up for’; and of course, plotting world domination and putting and end to reality tv once and for all. <br /><br />Oh, and beautiful women.
  • Country:United States

Posted 25 November 2007 - 08:32 AM

QUOTE (Deepsycher @ Nov 25 2007, 07:59 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Another annoying feature, I noticed recently on advert supported television in my place, they are sticking those annoying channel logos, at the top of the screen again. (I know what channel it is already. If I don't know, there are plenty of easy ways to find out (without disrupting an entire film with it), like on the menu or a news paper. It isn't diffcult, instead they ruin everybody's vision with their logo, just to tell what channel it is. Then it gets stuck to the recording, so it isn't worth filtering and keeping.


That is pretty gay, I have to agree with you. But as much of a pain in the ass you make taping your favorite shows out ot be, I probably wouldnt bother with it anyway.
0

Page 1 of 1


Fast Reply

  • Decrease editor size
  • Increase editor size