A problem I need TiVo to solve.

Buy more tuners. Like a lifetimed series3HD you should be able to find well under $100. Or look into magical means to get the stray couple of shows. Or buy a dongle and record a show or two directly to your laptop.

 

Buy a second Tivo.

Nobody on any platform has this issue solved as far as I know. Nobody will solve it, UNLESS they have some guy somewhere watch the game manually, and push a button that sends a remote signal to all the Tivo's recording that game to STOP.

So, your easiest solution is either to give up, buy another Tivo, or buy a couple of those $32 Mediasonic or Iview dvr's to record the game OTA all by itself. Then you can reserve the Tivo for your other stuff.

Happy wife, happy life...

 

OP, this is the bane of so many households. There may be a technological solution the cable and sat companies can employ, but it would cost money and the MVPD's feel they are paying enough to Gracenote (bought by Tribune) for the guide data to solve a problem most experienced in only about half the country. I can tell you that over 30 years ago such technology was used to start and stop recordings devices used by broadcasters so they would not miss there feeds. In other words, the commands would not be sent until the show actually started and recording stopped when the command to stop was sent. Time on the clock was irrelevant. Sadly, no one has such a working scheme for consumers, and if there were, it would cost MONEY for MVPD's to pay fees to use it.

Easiest solution is to buy another TiVo with Lifetime, ideally no less than a Premiere, on ebay if you don't want to pay TiVo or a retailer for the latest. Again, I would stick with Series 4 or 5 TiVo's, check out ebay for what is available, often at pretty good prices. Series 4 and 5 TiVo's can STREAM to one another, so the effect would be that the back-up TiVo would records the shows for sure, and then you can still watch them, even as they record, on the main TiVo, you don't need to TRANSFER, just watch the show from the main TiVo--it will stream the show in real time.

If the channels you need to record are OTA, then you might consider an antenna to received the OTA's and then you could get an even less expensive Series 3 TiVo such as the original Series 3 (with OLED display), or TiVo HD, or HDXL, all are Series 3. While the S3's can not record the newly implemented MPEG4 on most cable cos., they can still record the MPEG2 still used by broadcasters. Once the shows have finished recording on the S3, you can then TRANSFER the show to the main TiVo, and you can watch it while it transfers, if you network is speedy enough. S3's can NOT STREAM to other DVR's; they can only transfer recordings AFTER the recordings have finished.

I hope you can find a solution that fits your needs. Let us know what you end up doing.

 

But of course it's not the games which are the problem, it's the other shows getting bumped by the games.

 

Ok, so are any of your wife's shows on later (outside of primetime), for a second showing? If so, just set the Tivo to record the later showing for those shows.

That's what we do to get around this. Works great for cable channel shows, as most of those have multiple showings. If they are network broadcast OTA shows, you probably can't do this however..

 

.....or move to Hawaii where the first game starts at 7 or 8 am and the last game finishes by 6 or 7 PM, at the latest!

 

That would be a nice feature to have and it will probably take some sort of smart programming to pull it off. Nice suggestions from everyone especially the one from Dave. haha!

 

We occasionally run out of tuners (Roamio Plus w/6 tuners). Usually a mix of network (NBC, FOX, ABC, CBS) and other channels (HGTV, Discovery, etc). The other channels almost always repeat their shows in the overnight hours, the major networks do not. My solution is to record the other network shows in the overnight hours.

The Roamio will often grab a missed recording in the overnight hours -- but I keep an eye on the to-do list and manage these conflicts myself (since the major networks don't repeat overnight).

When we record a Sunday night show on CBS we pad the OnePass with an extra hour. Then you don't need to know if football on CBS is ending on time or late. (?!?! -- it always runs late!)

 

There is no possible perfect solution to this problem, live programming can be extended beyond its allotted time with no warning and no way to change schedules before it happens. It may be something better than what we do now can be implemented but an absolute perfect handling will never be. As others mentioned, enough tuners with user involvement, using padding to schedule according to potential overruns to handle any issues works the best. I have been using that method for 15 years and I don't see doing anything differently the next 15.

 

I've also had problems with too much to record on Sunday night. But much of it is on cable channels like AMC and HBO where they repeat it multiple times during the week, and also early Monday morning. So I just set the priority a little lower for shows that that I know will be repeated again, so, the TiVo records them a little later than their very first airing.

 

If you're having this problem this week a simple solution might be to have your wife quit recording every show, and only record new episodes. I really doubt if she's doing that this week because almost everything is a rerun this week.

 

California is far enough west to fix the sports problem, although Hawaii is a much nicer solution!

If you have a six-tuner Roamio you could set up a six hour manual recording for every broadcast channel on Sunday night, but of course it would become a pain to find your shows, and you wouldn't be avoiding recording repeats.

Sundays and Tuesdays are the nights I have unresolvable conflicts. I have dealt with that by buying a second Roamio.

 

I have a 6 tuner Roamio and on Sunday night CBS shows I just add an extra hour to each show following the game, has worked for years without problems, but my wife does have her own Roamio, and does her own thing with it.

 

Well, hopefully any network airing football (or live sports) on sunday learns to book a "post game show" for a 1/2 hour or so after and then that becomes your buffer. Not always enough though.

 

Hopper3

 

Assuming the OP catches his thread was neco'd

What exactly is she recording? I would assume CBS shows? Usually the simple answer is to just pad your last CBS recording by an hour or two...this will only use one of the tuners. Fox rarely runs over since they have a postgame show but do the same thing, pad by an hour so then the Fox shows will only use 1 tuner. Problem solved.

 

Assuming you have cable, are any of the shows available via their VOD system? Or one of the streaming services?

 

Works for me. Pad 8pm by one hour, 10pm by one hour. Only one tuner needed. Not perfect, but it nothing is.