Using available CPU cycles

[dshinnick]

Okay guys, here's one of my big questions/objections with Tivo. Like many of us, I have quite a few items on my Wishlist, but they're not set to auto-record; I want to review the list of "found" Wishlist items, and then decide if I want to record them or not. When I tell the Tivo to display upcoming Wishlist items it takes 2-3 minutes (or more) for it compile the list. I've never understood why the box can't compile this list, maybe once a day after the daily download, and keep it tucked away on the hard drive. Then when I ask for it it just picks it up, maybe tweaks it for last minute changes, and displays it. Most of the time we're not watching TV so it must have some unused CPU cycles just waiting to be put to good use.

I've gotten in the habit of telling it to display the list, then going in the kitchen and cleaning up for awhile or brushing my teeth, then coming back down to peruse the list. Kinda seems like having the Tivo compile this list in the background when nothing else is going on wouldn't have been difficult programming-wise, and would make it a bit more convenient.

Thoughts?

dave

[ZeoTiVo]

how big is this wishlist - even if I do a wishlist like keyword Christmas it takes maybe 40 seconds to com[ile the list and display it. adn this is on a Toshiba TiVo DVR that is not the fastest TiVo

[cheezus]

I think he's talking about 'view all wishlist items', and probably has a lot of wishlists

and in the same vein: I reorder season passes. I understand that repopulating the todo list is a complicated task, but can't it process the next hour (couple seconds), and then do the rest of the processing in the background?

[dshinnick]

Yeah, I have probably 20 items on my wishlist, and some of them that finds a lot of shows, like "history" or "comedy". Still, it seems it could compile this list in the background and have it ready to go when I call for it!

dave

[ZeoTiVo]

ah ok, so basically you have wishlists to filter out a few things from the guide and then show everything else.

I rarely use the view all but setup specific wishlists like for Olympics and roll through them for shows to record.


but background processing can work but not sure TiVo box would be that quick at reading a text file and formatting it for the screen anyway when it has that much data.