Just curious.... I'm not going to bother to call Tivo on this since they will just tell me to re-boot, force a connection, etc.
Paul
OK, continuation of the story in case anyone else finds this thread trying to research this issue......
It did it again about an hour ago. This time I was paying closer attention and I think I know what is happening.
1. Watch a live program while recording three other shows on other channels. In other words, all four tuners are in use with one dedicated to the live program.
2. Pause that live program for (say) 20 minutes and then resume watching the live program (now buffered).
3. While watching the buffered live program, the buffered program ends
in real time. This apparently frees up the tuner in spite of the fact that the buffer is still playing.
4.
While still watching the buffered program, if the Tivo needs to begin a scheduled recording on a different channel it will use the now freed tuner. So far, so good. However, in this case it does not give any warning.... it just abruptly changes the channel. Again, so far, so good.
But.... the channel change apparently also dumps the buffer even though you are currently watching it so the result is that you get cut off without any warning as soon as the channel changes.
Expected behavior IMO would be to warn the user ANY time the channel needs to change for ANY reason, and allow the user to decide whether or not to cancel the channel change and thus retain the buffer.
Armed with this additional information, and against my better judgement, I called Tivo support in an attempt to report the apparent bug. Boy was that a waste of time. After clearly and concisely describing the issue.... three times..... and getting very scrambled read backs, I thought I at least got the support rep to understand the issue. Wrong. He went away for a while, then came back and told me that the only time the Tivo would put up a warning was if it was about to begin a recording
on the same channel. He insisted that if it needed to
change the channel it would not warn. And here's the irony..... while we were discussing this bit of mis-information
it put up the very "about to change channel" warning that he insisted it would not put up I assume I got the warning this time around because I was watching live TV
without buffering.
At that point, I asked for a supervisor. Once again, it took a couple tries to get her to understand the issue, only to have her tell me the same thing.... that it would not warn about changing the channel unless I was watching the channel it needed to.... change.... to. She then started to descend down the "force a connection, reboot, replace the Tivo" rabbit hole, which I refused to go along with.
What a disaster of a company! The only way to contact them is through their offshore tech support and there doesn't seem to be any way to report an actual software issue.... assuming you can get them to understand the issue in the first place.
Paul