TiVo Headaches

Tivo Headaches

I love my Tivo. It has been a loyal friend for many years recording thousands of hours (10s of thousands?) of shows and dutifully playing them back so that I didn't have to watch commercials or boring parts. But in the past week, it has been betraying me. Programs I had just set up refused to be recorded and when I set up the new “One Pass” (Tivo used to have “Season Pass”), it would always try to show me all the programs I could pay for and then not record those episodes for free. What was going on? Did the recent update that provided the ability to list streaming shows on the “My Shows” screen require Tivo to highlight the paid options? Why weren't my shows being recorded when I told the machine to? Finally, last night I was so pissed off I had to get to the bottom of the issue – the damn thing did not record Big Crazy Family Adventure! (Luckily my 2nd Tivo recorded it in another room – good thing I have a failsafe for shows I really want to watch)

So what was the deal? Apparently when Tivo updated from “Season Pass” to “One Pass”, they not only added in the ability to see streaming shows more easily, they added in some options for the “One Pass” that I'm sure they felt made it better than the previous “Season Pass”. One of these options is the “Record in HD” option. This sounds good, but there are 3 settings – Always, If Available, and Never. The problem arrises when the setting defaults to Always – which will only record a show IF there is an HD version. Why Tivo thought it was best to set the most restrictive setting as the default, I don't know, but it was a bad user interface decision. Basically what has been happening with my Tivo is that any show that I set up a “One Pass” for will ONLY record if there is an airing on a HD channel. I have a bunch of HD channels, but without doing a count, I'd say at least 50% of my channels do not have an HD equivalent. That means with Tivo's new default setting, I would not be recording anything that airs on those 50% of channels I have access to.

This is just dumb Tivo.

In any case, I figured out that you can change the default settings so that it would default to “if possible” so I would by default be able to record on any channel I receive. While I was in the default settings, I turned off the setting that asked if I wanted to show programs that I could rent or buy – If I want to pay money for a show, I'll actively seek it out – I don't want to accidentally start streaming a show I thought was free (or at least covered in all the ungodly amounts of money I fork over to Time Warner Cable, Netflix, and Amazon every month).

With my new settings in place I set to the task of deleting and recreating my “One Pass” entries for shows I wanted to record in the last few months – what a pain!

Morning Ramble #12

#Tivo #TV