User-hostile Music, Photos, & More GUI

You might have better luck with iTunes radio stations. If you move them to a playlist, TiVo can play many but not all of iTunes radio stations. I find the selection, reliability, and sound quality vastly superior to Live365.

I'm accessing iTunes on an iMac G5 with a TiVo Series3, but I think it should work with iTunes on Windows too.

 

Perhaps there is something wrong with your Tivo. I have three Tivos active and 4 more in the closet and I have certainly observed sluggishness if its been a while since I completely reset them.

And I've never seen a problem like this. What is Live365, is that one of the music channels you get? I do find it irritating to not be able to pause on music channel but Tivo doesnt seem to have a problem tuning to them.

 

Schmye I appreciate the clarification .... I wish I could help but at least now I understand. If you see this on multiple boxes surely you are not the only one to deal with this. I'll help search for precedent. Good luck.

 

how quick are you hitting the button to go into Live365. I do see that every time that Music, photos and more list of choices is created that it starts out yahoo! photos and then when the rest of the apps are determined and listed that product watch does always get the highlight. But my list forms quickly and once done the highlight does not bounce around but goes in on the app highlighted.

maybe taken a few extra seconds the first time to make sure the list is fully formed and the highlight will not move will save you some frustration

 

Dude, I just posted how it behaved on my 240 model Tivo. I did it a bunch of times to see what would happen. every time I came back to the list of apps I saw only Yahoo! photos and my local stuff. then the rest of the apps were presented on the screen in about 2 seconds. After all the apps and icons are in place the highlight did not bounce around on my 240 model TiVo but stayed on where ever I moved it.

So what you are seeing on your TiVo is not normal behavior. It could be because of your internet speed or some glitch in your TiVo or low memory resources to work with, etc.. These are speculations on my part becasue I think you are seeing something that does not happen on most TiVo DVRs.

 

Speaking just for myself... and even as a long time critic of Tivo Corporate behavior toward customers, it was the term "user hostile" that made me feel initially defensive on Tivo's behalf.


This led me to read up on Product Watch. I've missed all thos because years ago I got irritated with Tivo reqiring that you opt out if you don't want data collection.

According I use only DirecTivos with the phone line unplugged.

I guess because of this I have missed all the controversy surrounding ads.

So I apologize for pre-judging on an issue I don't have to deal with.

I am interested because I have been looking periodically at going to Comcast which would require different Tivos. To help me understand, if you don't mind, are you saying that the Product Watch causes a general performance problem, or that your product watch is malfunctioning or that the design keeps changing you back to ads when you don't want that.

I think you are saying that last one, which, if true would discourage from changing to a more modern Tivo.

 

When Tivo first started sticking apps in the "Music, Photos & More" (in ye old days we just had music and videos)...it was suggested that it would be nice if Tivo allowed us to choose a sort order for the apps. A locally fixed cached sort list on this Tivo listing might help with the 'bouncing around' as the apps first broadcast themselves and appear. [Of course hiding selected things would be a nice feature too]

I wonder if the all the apps in Music, Photos and More, come from the same IP address. Otherwise we could find the Product Watch server IP and block it on your router.

 

I was just using my Music, Photos, and More screen on my S3 a couple of nights ago, and it still behaves as it always do. When it starts up, it only has a few items, then things like Yahoo stuff show up, and then the subscriptions I have from apps.tv show up. After a couple of seconds, everything is in place, and I can move my cursors around any where I want and stays there, it doesn't jump back to Product Watch by itself.

 

I think what is happening is that some of the apps are appearing/displaying quite bit later for the OP....and each time a new app appears (ie is discovered by his tivo) the 'selection' goes back to the top item (For him that is Product Watch). Mine all appear roughly at the sametime, so I can't dup.

 

I have a 540 ST Tivo. I just went into "Music, Photos, & More". It took 8 seconds to build, and the app that was highlighted was the one I last used.

Two to three weeks ago, I started having sluggishness in my Tivocast menu and was not getting downloads, so I shared in your frustration.
I counted 19 seconds between key press and UI response.
Things are OK now (so far), so I just chalked it up to Tivo tweaking their servers.
We'll see...

My suggestion* to you is to power down EVERYTHING and then power back up in the following order: Cable/DSL modem, router, Tivo, computer.


* If you've already tried this, I apologize.

 

actually that is the root casue of your problem. Here is the missing piece of the puzzle for you, HME apps are not a predertimned menu item per se - HME apps work from a server outside the TiVo and thus the functionality of remembering the last menu item used does not apply to HME app listings. Go to find programs - anything up high is a stock Tivo app and the highlight will remember which item it was on last. The bottom three for "download TV and movies", Kidzone, and "Universal Swivel Search" are HMe apps and the highlight will not remember being on those after you go into the HME app part of those menu choices

so it is not a "deliberate" snatching of the highlight back to Product Watch but just the hassle of how HME list of apps remakes itself coupled with your particular "Music, Photos a& More" list building. A slow resposne from the internet would effect getting all the Yahoo pieces built quickly and some menu items might be slow for other reasons maybe you have apps.tv or PlayTeeVee included and it is slow to build. This 'snatching the cursor' behavior I have seen when I used HME on my old and slow ToshiVo RS TX20.

I know this does not fix it and still the hassle of hitting product watch is there but on the ToShiVo I found that I just had to wait for the list of apps to settle down before selecting one to use.

 

I agree 100%. As a former software engineer in the publishing field (ATEX, Interleaf, Bitstream, and Harlequin) I feel your pain.

I recommend you start up the menu, turn on the coffeemaker, and then come back to turn on music. If your coffeemaker is on a timer, you can use the time to pop the bread in the toaster.

 

Come to think of it: The real question is, why do you have to use the TiVo menu to start the morning music in the first place?

Why don't any of these state-of-the-art music and video devices have proper timer functions? Wasn't this problem solved in the 60s with clock radios?

My TiVo and Roku Soundbridge are firmly stuck in the paradigms of TV and radio devices, respectively. That's so mid-20th century!

My goal is to rig a PC to wake up my sound system and run a playlist on shuffle through my favorite media player software. (J River MediaCenter rocks!)

Then all I will need is a sensor to detect when I come down the stairs. Hmm, it will need some sort of intelligence to know when I'm just coming down to check out that odd noise in the foyer...

 

well like I siad, it just takes 2 seconds on my TiVo DVR (DT model) to build the list and after that the highlight works just fine. So on my TiVo the HME apps list is very user friendly for a grandma.

Now what I would like is a way to select which apps show up from the list so it does not have to build them all, but that is not the TiVo KISS approach as then people need to know to go configure the screen which TiVo design avoids at all costs so far.

the idea of a timer sounds really cool