Allow users to chose between SD and HD material (Series 3 issue)

[jtown]

I've never poked into this forum before and I'm a bit shocked not to see much mention of this issue.

S3 users need (yes, need) a way to tell the S3 whether to record a program from the SD channel or the HD channel. A lot of the programming shown on the HD channels is really SD material scaled up to HD resolutions. Recording it on the HD channels is a huge waste of space. However, if we leave the non-HD channel in our lineup, the HD material won't get recorded in HD. The Tivo seems to default to the lowest number channel on which a show appears.

This is the kind of thing I would have expected to be an obvious requirement. Frankly, I was shocked to find that I had no way to pick which channel to pick when setting up wish list recordings. Especially when the information required to handle automatic selection already exists in the program information. True HD shows are flagged as HDTV (in parenthesis after the show description). That's why some material recorded on the HD channels doesn't show up in the HDTV recordings folder. The S3's software is already using this flag to categorize recorded material.

This flag could easily be used to select the SD and HD versions of a channel automatically. Add another quality setting to the recording setup screen. "Basic", "Medium", "High", "Best", "HD". Also, in the Channels You Receive screen, add a checkbox that lets the user identify which channels are HD (assuming this information isn't already available from the data provided by the cablecards). When the user selects a quality setting of "HD", search the HD channels first, then fall back to "Best" quality on SD channels.

I know this isn't an issue for people who live by Season Passes but I use a lot of wish lists to catch sporting events and it wastes a lot of space having a 2-3 hour event recorded on an HD channel when the source material was SD. A 3 hour game takes up 10% of the S3's stock capacity when it could be as little as 1%.

[horseradish]

S3 users need (yes, need) a way to tell the S3 whether to record a program from the SD channel or the HD channel. A lot of the programming shown on the HD channels is really SD material scaled up to HD resolutions. Recording it on the HD channels is a huge waste of space. However, if we leave the non-HD channel in our lineup, the HD material won't get recorded in HD. The Tivo seems to default to the lowest number channel on which a show appears.
It could get even more complex than this. In my case, I'm getting my HD content via OTA antenna, and I have several local stations that have a lower antenna channel than the analog-equivalent cable channel.

My problem is a bit different than yours, in that I am still using a CRT-based television, "fed" by s-video instead of component or HDMI. Needless to say, the best I can display is 480i.

However, it's been my experience that the OTA digital signal—down-sampled though it may be—looks significantly better than the analog-only cable that is my primary content source.

I'd like to be able to tell the TiVo to save the HD content in "ED" or 480i digital to get the higher quality of the digital source, with the lower storage space requirements that it would entail versus say 720p.

My solution would be to have two flags for quality: the first would select the preference for analog vs digital (if available in both formats), and the second to select the compression quality (analog) or resolution (digital) of the content.

The other thing I'd like is to have the ability to "upgrade" the stored content if/when a "better" version comes along: suppose you get a "hit" for a wishlist, so it's recorded. That first hit is SD, which is fine, but then a repeat shows up a month later in HD. If the TiVo still has the original copy of the content saved (either because there's free space, or I've specifically requested it to be retained until manually deleted), then I would like the system to replace the SD/analog content with the HD/digital version.