The Free Space Indicator Thread

[Button2]

Since I have this functionality with my Dish PVR 501 (their first DVR model, if I'm not mistaken--I've had it quite awhile) when I recently acquired my TiVo I was very surprised to see that with all its "Bells and Whistles" it doesn't have it!

On the old 501, it tells you approximately how much recording time is currently remaining. I'm no techie, but I never found it confusing. It was obvious to me that if I had things set up to record, any existing recordings that I hadn't marked "Protect" might be overwritten if space ran out (oldest first). And it warned me if there wasn't enough space to record something.

Fortunately, I bought the Humax DRT 800, so I just burn what I want to keep to DVD-R or RW and that frees up space. Still, it would be nice to be able to see where I am in terms of recording time remaining.

[mojomarc]

How about it's so important that i will probably use my toshiba at tivo basic and get a replay that suppose to have this function.

Hi everyone--TiVo newbie here. Just bought it yesterday, as a matter of fact, to replace my dead ReplayTV (a Panasonic Showstopper version that preceded the 4000 series from ReplayTV--would have bought another Replay, but it would seem no one in Seattle likes to stock them for some reason, and life without a DVR is too painful to contemplate after using one almost since the inception of the technology), so perhaps I can provide a bit of illumination on this. In ReplayTV, one of the really nice things was that you culd go to the list showing your recorded shows with only one button (the equivalent of going to the "Now Playing List"), and when you went there, it told you how much space you had remaining at your default recording level in hours. The way they figured this was not based on the repeat recordings (similar to Seasons Pass), but rather the number of guaranteed recordings you had scheduled. I know from my few hours with the TiVo that there is a setting a couple menus deep when you select a show to record as part of a Seasons Pass to give that a priority in case of conflicts--well, ReplayTV just used a guarantee function, told you if you had a conflict, and allowed you to select which one conflicted. Similar feature, except that a guaranteed record setting really did let you know what was going on better--the show was guaranteed, and thus the ReplayTV reserved the space for that show and took it out of your remaining available time counter. It was a nice feature, one that I'm sure I'm going to miss, since it let you know exactly how much new stuff you could try to grab. Because TiVo doesn't use the same paradigm, I am not sure if they could calculate the remaining time in the same way, but if they could at least mark off the shows that are going to record at the highest priority and let you know what space is available after that, at least you could know what high priority shows you could still grab.

But then again, maybe as a newbie to TiVo I'm confused on how the priority works--if there is limited space, and you have a high priority show, will TiVo randomly overwrite a lower priority show, or will it just say "not enough space" and skip your high priority show? If so, that really does suck, and I would add a suggestion that they add a guaranteed show system that did reserve the time a priori.

[mojomarc]

Lastly, let us have more control over what gets recordered out of 'TiVo Suggestions' list. I HATE having to 'thumbs down' shows that I like just because they are in syndication!

Once again, I'm new to TiVo, but this is something ReplayTV handled better (as near as I can figure): when you selected a show for repeated viewings, you could customize it so it would only record on certain days of the week and certain times. This "first run and reruns" setting seems far too crude. If anyone has any pointers on the best way to manipulate this, I would appreciate it greatly.

[DJQuad]

Couldn't JavaHMO support this with little effort? It already shows the Duration and Size for each recording. Just subtract the duration of all recordings from the model size (as in 80 hour).

[VTHodge]

Once again, I'm new to TiVo, but this is something ReplayTV handled better (as near as I can figure): when you selected a show for repeated viewings, you could customize it so it would only record on certain days of the week and certain times. This "first run and reruns" setting seems far too crude. If anyone has any pointers on the best way to manipulate this, I would appreciate it greatly.

The easiest way to record a certain day and time is to set up a manual recording for that date and time.

[martinp13]

On the old 501, it tells you approximately how much recording time is currently remaining. I'm no techie, but I never found it confusing.Ah, there's the devil word: "approximately"!

So let's set up a scenario: you have approximately 10 hours of free space. You set it up to record exactly 9.5 hours of stuff while you're slaving at work. You come home, the 9.5 hours are recorded, and one unprotected show was deleted. Do you find that confusing? I know a lot of non-techies would!

[seattlejoe7]

Hi everyone--TiVo newbie here.
Hiya! Another newbie from Seattle here. (Like you would not have guessed!)

I just had to add my complaint over the lack of a "Remaining Space" indication of some sort, and also my surprise that this topic has been around for 2-3 years, and has apparently been ignored by TiVo.

"-?

[Krosis]

Ah, there's the devil word: "approximately"!
So let's set up a scenario: you have approximately 10 hours of free space. You set it up to record exactly 9.5 hours of stuff while you're slaving at work. You come home, the 9.5 hours are recorded, and one unprotected show was deleted. Do you find that confusing? I know a lot of non-techies would!
If they can't comprehend what the word approximately means then they will have more serious problems in life than worrying about their TiVo.

You're never to old to learn something, maybe this will be a good place for them to start.

Krosis

[radishstove]

I was noticing that with the Tivo Desktop software (and TivoToGo) you can view the individual file sizes for each program in the "Pick Recordings to Transfer" window. It will even total up the size for all of the files if you manually check them off but this can be a pain if you have a lot of programs recorded. It doesn't seem like it should be too difficult to add the ability to "Select All" or select a range of shows from the list so that you could at least get a feel for how much program data is being used.

[kbohip]

Tivo newbie and Dish DVR (shudders) veteran here. I just wanted to add my support of a FSI. It really is ridiculous that Tivo hasn't added one of these yet, especially when so far over 97% of the people who voted on this thread like the idea. Having a FSI is really nice, especially after you've gotten used to it. The idea of using the suggestions to guage your free space is stupid imho.

This is one of the very few features that I miss from my Dish DVR. Let's face it, Tivo should be better than a Dish DVR in EVERY aspect!

[michael480]

I am fairly new to this site, but have been a Tivo user since 2002. There is/was a Disc space remaining indicator prior to the Version 7 release of the software. This was enabled ofcourse by going through a backdoor. I have not been able to get back to this since this latest release of software. Why can't this screen be made available? I found it very useful as I was able to tell when I was running close to out of space. Even if it is not 100% accurate and Tivo programmers are worried that its not accurate or something, they could put a disclaimer on the screen. It is probably still available, it is just a matter of getting to it. It sounds like it would be something very simple to do and please alot of Tivo users. All this other stuff that they spend the time on not all users would use, but disc space I would think most would.

Michael

[hitech_rednek]

Having worked in software development and systems engineering in the past, it seems quite ridiculous that this feature is not available. If they had it before and then removed it, that's even worse. :-(

[nrowe]

Hey everyone, install Galleon 1.5 Tivo Media Server on your PC, activate the ToGo feature, and "voila" there is now an up-to-date "space used" and "free space left" indicators showing up on your Tivo screen under "Music, Photos and More" | ToGo screen.

My apologies if this tip has been shared before but I searched high and low before I posted this message and i couldn't find anyone discussing it. This is what I had been searching for, and is so much faster than accessing the Tivo Desktop transfer screen and clicking through all the recordings manually.

I think this thread is finally reaching a conclusion - unless Tivo decides to listen to us all and implement an official solution to the #1 user request it seems.

Nigel

[newsposter]

Not reaching a conclusion for directivo users :) We are still lost. Tis a shame on a 1000 dollar machine not to have it. Thankfully I paid 90% less than that

[DorianX]

I'm firmly of the opinion that this would be useful. I understand a lot of the arguments against, but I keep noticing that a lot of the analogies used (gas in the tank, money in your bank account) are to things where you *do* have the relevant indicator, and people seem to do just fine and find it plenty useful. (In fact, the gas tank is a good analogy. There's no really solid mathematical way to convert it to how many miles or minutes you have till empty, but it's still a really useful indicator and all cars have one, and if it breaks, you get into trouble). My own usage of the tivo is typically "Watch and delete unless I think I'm liable to want to watch again," so I'd like to know whether I need to take action to keep older recordings from expiring, without using the KUID, since I'm still willing to lose some shows if, say, I'm out of town unexpectedly. I suspect that the percentage of used space on my machine stays fairly stable over time. I bet it creeps up slowly during the week, then drops back down sunday when I get myself caught up. If I found the percentage going outside of a fairly narrow range, I'd know that I was in danger of losing some unwatched programs if I didn't go through and kill some things. I trust the Tivo to delete programs in a reasonable way, but not the *optimal* way, so I'd rather do it myself.

But what I find myself thinking is whether there might not be another way.

Here's what I think would be useful: a "watched" flag. Initially unset for all recordings. Automatically set when a program has been watched. Manually overridable. Introduce new expiry options: "Don't expire until watched" (either "expire immediately after watching" or "don't start the expiration clock until watched". Preferably both). Issue an alert if an unwatched program is going to be deleted within 24 hours (I'll set the flag by myself if I don't care to be alerted for this program).

Then show me the percentage of used space and the percentage of space used by unwatched programs. And I'm smart enough to deal with the rest. But so is everyone else who balances their own checkbook or drives a car regularly without running out of gas.

[Slicker]

It seems the Galleon ToGo measurement is fine, for a single machine user. But, unless I'm completely off, that meter is for space in use and available on ALL tivos that ToGo has access to.

[evilipoo]

A gauge, a meter, a pie chart... Anything is better than nothing...

[anonymuse]

How about X hours marked as "Keep Until I Delete", X hours marked as "May be deleted to make room', and X hours available?

[pldoolittle]

DVR's get cheaper by the day, and every media company alive is selling them below cost and/or giving them away as freebies. The only way that Tivo can hope to survive long term is to provide a vastly superior product. A product so superior in fact, that people will willingly pay to have it instead of a nominally similar product for free.

Unfortunately for us, however, Tivo seems to still be so intoxicated from their initial successes at creating Tivo that they are completely unaware that their competition has caught up to them, and market conditions are rendering their pride and joy unable to compete. That may sound harsh, but if you look at the time-to-market of simple software features like overlap protection (3 yrs), and FSI (3 years and counting) it is obvious that Tivo either doesn't see what is happening, or doesn't care. Since they are in the business to make money, I can only reasonably assume the former.

So, when the time comes that Tivo Corp has taken it's last breath, and our boxes sit idle for lack of program data, and this forum serves only as a place to reminisce about the "good old days when we had Tivo", will someone please print out this thread and send it to the newspaper so Tivo will have a proper obituary.

[pldoolittle]

Back on topic:

For those who argue about the infinite complexity of it, I simply do not understand your logic. FSI is an outrageously simple request. Provide a graph covering a fixed period of time (prog data = 2 weeks?) that shows used space as a percentage of total space. The prediction/graph would be based entirely on what the tivo knows about at the time the graph is generated. Yes, at some point the graph will go to 100% and flatline as deletions make room for additions. But even then it is not useless as the flatlines illustrate the need to examine one's scheduled usage.

Why do I want this feature? First, I want to know if any of our regular shows (i.e. seasons passes) are at risk while we are on vacation w/o scanning the to-do/history episode by episode. If I look and the unit never rises above 90% all week, I can leave without concern. On the other hand, if I see the graph flatline on Thursday I know that I need to make plans before I leave.

Second, as I type I am busy making lists, spreadsheets, etc as I try to find out why my to do list and history for this week are peppered with "not recorded - space unavailable" messages. I have a 120Gb Hdd (132hrs) and only 12 hours of "best" recordings. Unless I am mistaken, that leaves me with about 13 hours of "best" space available. at least a graph would give me a place to start looking.

Philip

[dcahoe]

For anyone interested, I have written a little app that runs on a Windows PC that will estimate the space remaining on a TiVo unit that is networked and running version 7.x.

Here is a link to a page where it can be downloaded: http://bellsouthpwp.net/d/c/dcahoe/tivo/index.htm

Thanks in advance for anyone giving it a test.

Sorry for anyone who doesn't run Windows or is not networked. I know it isn't nearly the same as having an indicator/screen on the TiVo unit itself, but it works for me.

[HotStuff2]

For anyone interested, I have written a little app that runs on a Windows PC that will estimate the space remaining on a TiVo unit that is networked and running version 7.x.

Here is a link to a page where it can be downloaded: http://bellsouthpwp.net/d/c/dcahoe/tivo/index.htm

Thanks in advance for anyone giving it a test.

Sorry for anyone who doesn't run Windows or is not networked. I know it isn't nearly the same as having an indicator/screen on the TiVo unit itself, but it works for me.WHen I run the .exe, I get an error dialog:

Run-time error '339':

Component 'Mschrt20.ocx' or one of it's dependencies is not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid.

[dcahoe]

Thanks HotStuff2, I was trying to keep my program lean with just a simple .exe and not creating an install package.

I have now created an install package which includes the required Microsoft provided ActiveX controls to run the program. Just try downloading it again and running the setup program.

[Lord Wasco]

Virgin Poster...

But this is what I think. The thing has a hard drive, it has software, it's practically a computer. Why can't we have a "Customize" option for the Now Playing list? Windows Explorer allows you to pick the column headings you want to show. Why can't we do this with TiVo? I could care less what channel a certain program was on. So I want the ability to drop that column and add a "Time" column to show me how long each program is. I don't like having to go into each program to find out how long each show is. I want to be able to scan the first menu with having to go deeper. And at the bottom I would like a two pieces of information: Time Recorded (hrs) and Time Empty (hrs).

For those who don't care, maybe there could be a "Classic View" button so if you don't want to customize, you don't have to. Or if another family member tries to customize, you can hit the "Classic View" button, and zap, it goes back. If you wanted to make it a little more customizable, you can have more than one set of settings and nickname it.

I personally want an FSI. I want to know when I'm going to run out of space so I can manually delete the programs I'm least likely to watch. I recently had a major issue with the Olympics. I told it to record all the Olympics with a certain sport, and it recorded almost daily AND 3-5 hours at a time. And I didn't have time to keep up with the Olympics and TiVo deleted MANY of my shows that I never got around to watching. It sucked!

[JacksTiVo]

The new "Deleted Shows Folder" added in the recent update to the Series 2 indicates the number of deleted shows in the folder. It is a good indicator of the amount of free space available on the hard drive. For example, if the deleted shows are movies and you assume 2 hours per movie and there are 5 deleted movies then you know you have room for about 10 hours of new recordings. As new shows are recorded the TIVO deletes the recordings in the "deleted show folder" prior to erasing Tivo Suggestion recordings on the Now Playing list.

[mdfst13]

For example, if the deleted shows are movies and you assume 2 hours per movie and there are 5 deleted movies then you know you have room for about 10 hours of new recordings.The problem with that is that new recordings don't necessarily take up the same space as the previous recordings. For example, I have season passes in all of best, high, and medium quality. If all my deleted recordings are medium quality (default quality for TiVo suggestions), and all the shows I'm recording are best quality...

Note: I absolutely agree that the deleted folder provides the free space indicator functionality (I actually came to the forums to make that observation). I just want to remind people that the nature of TiVo makes a free space indicator not completely useful. In particular, the inability to predict the exact size of future recordings.

IMO, the best way to use a free space indicator is as a warning that tells you to *watch* things. I.e. when your delete movies is down to five, then its time to watch (and delete) a few things. It also may indicate that you should mark things as KUID or move suggestions to the recordings list (by selecting a KU date).

Anyway, kudos to Tivo for listening to their customers and providing this new functionality.

[tmjtivo]

i would love to have a space indicator, anything would be great.

[omni555]

I know there are probably other threads (and more recent) on this topic, but I have spent the last hour or so browsing thru THIS one and thought I'd put in my 2 cents worth HERE!

For the past several years I have been using DVR boxes from my cable company. They always had a FSI in the form of a bar, and indicated as a percentage the amount of space remaining free. Like below:

████████████████████____________| 37% Remaining

This is a very simple indicator, but I found it almost indispensable for my purposes.

The DVR box NEVER refused to allow me to set up a single or repeating recording simply because there wasn't enough space left. I remember being down to 2 or 3% remaining and STILL being able to schedule a repeating program of 1 hour duration for "Every day at 8:00 pm".

The point is that when I would see the indicator showing only a small percentage of space left, I would KNOW that I either had to watch and delete some programs, just outright deletes some programs, or take the risk of not having the newly set recording actually get recorded.

I recently downloaded dcahoe's utility TiVoPlayList to my PC and installed it. I find myself launching that utility several times a day to check on how well I am managing my new TiVo's space.

But MAN, would it ever be great if I could access that SAME information (or even just the bar described above from the cable company DVR) simply by hitting a few buttons on my TiVo remote!!!

There have been arguments made about how this feature "is not necessary" (Isn't there a LOT that isn't "necessary" that many people find quite useful or just plain nice to have?), but many of the rest of us could complain that there are a lot of features that WE do not find "necessary". Should we campaign to have them REMOVED just because WE do not use them???

Then there are the arguments that people would not be able to UNDERSTAND the FSI. ...Just HOW dumb are TiVo users perceived as being anyway?!!! It is SIMPLE! The indicator would tell you just how much space is CURRENTLY USED on your HD. You can do a little simple checking to see how much space you will need over the next little while (or there COULD be a separate option available to calculate this for you, but that would be another topic...) and therefore you would know whether you need to remove any current recordings in order for the ones scheduled to be recorded.

All I know is that right from the first time I used the DVR, I would regularly go to the screen showing the bar indicating space free on the HD.

I would never wish to go back to those DVR units. TiVo overall is MUCH better. But there ARE those few little things that the competition has that would make TiVo SOOOO much BETTER!!! ...At least for MANY of us users!!! :cool:

[pldoolittle]

I love my Tivos. But, IMHO the person(s) guiding development at Tivo is completely out of touch with the user base. Simple improvements like a FSI are never done, others like Deleted Items take years. And potential big sellers like cross box scheduling remain nothing more than a fantasy. Meanwhile, we get silly stuff like games and non-tv related stuff like purchasing movie tickets.

Look at how your subs use the boxes, not how you want them to use them. I have 3 boxes. I have them networked. I do not need dual tuner, I just need cross-box scheduling. Think about it: Develop software update, or begin another major hardware redesign, re-tool products, start a new marketing effort, etc...

Tivo Execs: PRINT OUT THE WISHLIST. Distribute it to everyone who is in a position to guide the companies direction. Your subscribers are telling you how to beat the cable companies free DVRs. You could pay market analysts $1,000,000's and not get advice as good as what you can get for free here in one thread.

[Radardog]

I guess I don't see the point of a free space indicator. I suppose I would use it if it was included, but I don't think it's important.

The Tivo is aware of how much space it has to record things and indicates if there's not enough room to record something. The purpose of a Tivo is to record shows, watch them, then clear them off. Yes, sometimes you may want to keep something around for an extended period of time, and for those things I can see a reason to have one. But if you go to the To Do List it shows you what your Tivo has capacity for.

[newsposter]

some people (no names mentioned), have hundreds of hours of programming and regularly run against limits of hard drive space....even when they have 2 tivos and 750 gigs of space....just imagine going away for a 3 day weekend and having all that HD pile up unwatched. It's a pain to calculate hours on suggestions to see what space you have left

[ps56k]

FSI - yeah, not complex, just a bar graph of % spaced used...
Even with all the variables of recording quality vs number of upcoming scheduled shows and everything else that would act as a speed bump - a simple graph would let you know if "in general" you have some space for recording.... or are getting low.

BTW - if these are suggestions - how do we actually contact TiVo and fill up there "inbox" with these suggestions ?

[pldoolittle]

The Tivo is aware of how much space it has to record things and indicates if there's not enough room to record something.

Yes, but it lets you know by failing to record your favorite program. You know, the one that ran while you were out for the evening...

The purpose of a Tivo is to record shows, watch them, then clear them off.

Actually, the purpose of the tivo depends greatly on the user. For me, it's to delay a PT show until I get home at night. For my wife, it's to keep a weeks worth until Saturday when she does her chores and has a TV marathon. For my 5 year old, it's to keep a half dozen episodes of JoJo's circus handy at all times. For my teenager...

Anyway, cross those 4 usage patterns and you have a tivo that flirts with a full HDD on a regular basis. And a FSI would certainly help me avoid unneccessary losses.

Cars have gas gauges for a reason....

[ps56k]

I guess I don't see the point of a free space indicator. I suppose I would use it if it was included, but I don't think it's important.
.

then try driving your car without a gas gauge or odometer and let us know how that works for ya - or looking at your computer's disk space, or iPod space, camcorder, or ... just about anything based on some "capacity" has a capacity telling gauge.

[bidger]

Actually, the purpose of the tivo depends greatly on the user.
:up:

Absolutely! That's why some of choose to expand our TiVos, to allow for a bit of archiving. I've used them to store a season of "The Sopranos" until it came out on DVD. And then there are shows like "Cheap Seats" which I don't ever expect to see on DVD.

I don't use or want Suggestions, I just want to know when I'm running out of space with the unit without having to tally the hours accumulated in the box myself.

[newsposter]

it's even more fun tallying when you have HD stuff in the suggestions. I try to get as many HD suggestions as possible because then I can just use 8 hour for one show instead of adding up a bunch of smaller shows

[jtlytle]

The reason why DVR from Cable company have Free space Indicator is because they use one speed for Record Quality and it is easy to calculate how much free space left.

But for TiVo, there's four options for Record Quality : Basic, Medium, High and Best Quality. - So it is all depends on that variable, it is impossible to calcuate exactly the amount of free space available.

[omni555]

The reason why DVR from Cable company have Free space Indicator is because they use one speed for Record Quality and it is easy to calculate how much free space left.

But for TiVo, there's four options for Record Quality : Basic, Medium, High and Best Quality. - So it is all depends on that variable, it is impossible to calcuate exactly the amount of free space available.

Not TOTALLY accurate. When I had my cable company's DVR's, I found that the number of hours I could record before the hard drive filled up varied. Talking to a CC rep revealed the information that analog channels, digital channels, and HD channels required different amounts of space for the same one hour program (essentially, they were all of different "qualities").

I still found the FSI that was provided with their boxes to be a very useful feature.

What I don't understand is that the ability to do this is available but is not provided for use with the TiVo unit. I can load up the TiVoPlayList prog on my computer and see all the information (and more!) that is being asked for here. Clicking on the "View Graph" option, and selecting between "Graph Status" and "Graph Quality" views gives a wealth of information about the state of the hard drive.

There is even a little information "hidden" in the info screen on the TiVo itself that lets you know what percentage of the HD is used by each individual recording. Would it be all that difficult to have these percentages collected together and displayed somewhere as either a simple percentage or as a graph of some sort?

Right now, I would love to be able to open the TiVoPlayList program on the TV screen directly from my TiVo. ...IS that a possibility??? :cool:

[megazone]

Right now, I would love to be able to open the TiVoPlayList program on the TV screen directly from my TiVo. ...IS that a possibility??? :cool:Someone could implement the same functionality as an HME application, then you could.

[megazone]

I love my Tivos. But, IMHO the person(s) guiding development at Tivo is completely out of touch with the user base.Note that we, pretty much anyone posting here, is NOT representative of the bulk of their userbase. TiVo has WAY more data than anyone else on just how the boxes are being used, and what kind of requests they receive. You shouldn't presume that you have magical insight into the userbase and TiVo is getting it wrong just because you're not who they aim to please.

Look at how your subs use the boxes, not how you want them to use them. I have 3 boxes. I have them networked. I do not need dual tuner, I just need cross-box scheduling. Think about it: Develop software update, or begin another major hardware redesign, re-tool products, start a new marketing effort, etc... Yeah, think about it - you're the freak, not everyone else. So am I. The vast majority of TiVo households have one box. The largest single segment of subscribers use analog cable. And the S2DT is outselling the S2, even with the S2 being cheaper. People have been screaming for a dual-tuner TiVo since they first shipped. I have multiple, networked TiVos - and I wouldn't buy a single tuner TiVo again at this point even if they had cooperative scheduling. Coop would be nice, but dual-tuners is better.

TiVo is going after the meat of their market - you're just not it. Neither am I.

[pldoolittle]

Right now, I would love to be able to open the TiVoPlayList program on the TV screen directly from my TiVo. ...IS that a possibility??? :cool:

Amen. This is NOT rocket science, nor is it impossible. Quite frankly it's a relatively trivial programming task and I cannot understand why so many people insist that it will require fuzzy logic, 200 coders, and not less than 10MM lines of code. A FSI is simply a gauge of capacity used relative to total capacity. A "gas gauge" if you will.

For example; Right now on my TivoPlayList I see:

Now Playing - 17 Shows (16hr 44min using 42.28GB)
TimeLeft: ~ 26hr 9min (@Best) || 42hr 1min (@High) || 55hr 13min (@Medium) || 93hr 41min (@Basic)

Wonderful information. Now, I would like that same information located on one of my tivo menus so I don't have to get out the laptop just to make sure ER will record while I'm out for dinner tonight.

[bifsiff94]

A simple bar graph at the bottom of the now playing screen that has information about used space by category, and unused space.

Keep until I delete
Save until space needed
Suggestions
Unused disk space

For the S3, it might also be useful to see a breakdown of HD vs SD content.

[BrettStah]

http://www.angelfire.com/droid/drgonzo/horse.jpg

[DrASK]

The current line says something like the following for expired recordings:
This program may be deleted to make room for newer programs.

And something like the following for non-expired ones:
This program will be saved until at least Tue 3/23 10:00 am.

Here's what I want... if a show can be predicted to have a date/time at which is will have to be deleted, I want a line that says something like this:
This program is scheduled to be deleted on Tue 3/23 at 11:00 am to make room for a newer program.

If, based on the available space, existing recordings and upcoming recordings the Tivo will not have to delete a recording due to lack of space, a line something like the following:
This program is not currently scheduled to be deleted.

I'm not certain that existing Tivos, especially the first generation ones, can properly handle the extra workload that would be involved, however. The calculations that would be involved appear simple... just add up existing recordings and upcoming recordings, check available space, do some conservative estimating as needed, but the Tivos could already be maxed out with existing things to do.

I'm on page 8 trying to catch up, but when I saw this I had to comment.

I voted that I would pay for a FSI. I wish to rescind that vote. What I want is the above. This makes perfect sense to me. Tivo needs to work harder so I don't have to. It may not be possible, but I want it.

[fractalsphere]

Well, I've read through a good deal of this thread and the only suggestion I can make is that TiVo use the data already being used on the system to compile some kind of list of free and used space on the system. I can't see where it would be that hard to grab those stats for users to see.

If you drill into the 'information' of any particular recorded show you'll see the individual show usage stats (disk space % used and space used by that show in gigs). Why can't there be some sort of master listing (total disk space % used and total in gigs free)? I personally don't need to see how many minutes are available for recording, only how much space is free and how much I've used, but it seems to me it would be easy to calculate time left based on the free space, and just give total times available for each recording quality.

I'm a new TiVo user (Christmas 2006) and after a season pass or two with all-day re-runs I'm suddenly finding myself with 50 recordings on there and no realistic way of knowing how soon stuff will be auto-deleted or how much I need to prune the now playing list so stuff doesn't get automatically deleted by surprise.

It's a pain to go through and look up each show and total it together.

[juanian]

I was thrilled when the new folder appeared which showed the deleted programs, because it lets me know at least how much space I have left at a quick glance (assuming I know how big each of the deleted programs are). (In the past, I left watched shows as exclamation points, and added up the times from that, but there were undesired side-effects using that technique.)

At a minimum, what I would like is the following:

1: Re-enable the sort based on expiration time. (This used to be available a few versions ago after entering the S 0 R T code.) Sorting on expiration time would easily show the next program to be deleted (but, it would not show when, which would also be nice).

2: Update the list of deleted programs to allow page up/down to scroll between the deleted programs. (This would make it easier to add up the total deleted time; currently, each program needs to be individually selected from the list to see how much time the show consumes.)

#1 should be easy, but (sigh) might cause too much confusion for users, which might increase customer support calls, so TiVo will probably not turn it back on.

#2 should probably be easy to implement, but I can't be sure.

Yes, there are other things I'd like to see implemented, but these two should be able to be implemented with "relatively" little effort (probably more time to QA the change than to make the change).

P.S. I just helped a friend reconnect their TiVo; it was at version 7.1. After updating it to 8.1, there were some programs in the Deleted folder. So, it appears that deleted programs were being kept in an 'invisible' deleted folder as far back as 7.1!

[juanian]

One barely related enhancement I'd like to see -- when a program is deleted because the maximum number of recordings has been met, move the show to the Deleted folder. (As of 7.3.1, if the maximum number of recordings has been met (from a Season Pass or WishList), the oldest show is completely deleted when a new show is deleted.) I don't know if this now occurs for 8.1, but I sure hope it has been 'fixed' to support this.