juanian said:
Hopefully, somewhere, there will be a better description of exactly how the new clipping feature works. Is it only for shows that normally run a minute or two (or three or five) over, and/or does it apply to manually padded start and stop times? Also, is this a feature that has a setting to enable (or disable) it?
Here's an example: I like to watch Punk'd, but the start/stop times on MTV are horrible, so I pad extra time on my season pass. Since the shows are broadcast many, many times, I have the season pass set to a low priority, and eventually a showing of a specific episode will be recorded with the padded times. Will this new feature cause a problem with this (recording one of the earler showings of this low-priority season pass and removing the padding)?
I know that this overlap problem has been causing heartache ever since networks have been juggling times. Hopefully this new feature has been well thought out and will make nearly everybody happy. (Drat -- shoulda been on that beta team!)
Just got the update last night. Yes, the overlap protection also covers padded programs. Plus, if a show overlaps, the 'clipped' show shows with an asterisk in the To Do List. Unfortunately,
not all clipped shows get tagged with an asterisk.
After the upgrade, I checked my To Do List, and found an overlap (Punk'd was overlapping a show, and the other show was being clipped.) So, I changed the Season Pass of Punk'd to the end of the list, waited a while, then checked my To Do List. Unfortunately, it
is clipping the padding of that episode of Punk'd and worse: Punk'd is not listed with an asterisk in the To Do List. My TiVo has scheduled that episode of Punk'd, and has changed my "Start Recording" padding to "On-time", with no notification to me.
So, now I can't quickly check my To Do List for an asterisk to see if I have an overlap -- I must check every episode of Punk'd (and every other show that I have purposefully added start/end padding to) to see if it has had its padding time changed.
A possible solution is to change my padding time to be outside of the maximum overlap that will be clipped. Unfortunately, this is 5 minutes (and
not changeable by the user). So, I would need to add 10 minutes of padding at the beginning and end of my Season Pass (making these 30 minute episodes 50 minutes). Quite a waste!
I also have a block of Punk'd episodes that are being shown, and (one of my problems in the past) is that every other show would record, and not every show (which would be fine, since I could watch the end of one show which would be recorded at the beginning of the next show). Unfortunately, Overlap Protection doesn't clip for
same priority shows, only lesser priority shows (oh well).
OK, now for the part of Overlap Protection that I like (hey, I'm not normally a sourpuss!) -- when scheduling an individual recording, you
can now schedule a recording that will overlap other recordings. Now, I think I have seen some posts in some threads complaining about which show is being clipped, but if the show being clipped is not the desired show, it is (fairly) easy to go to the show being clipped and force it to be fully recorded (which will make
that show not be clipped). The only disadvantage to that is if the show changes (ie. is removed from the program guide, is rescheduled to a different time, or has the episode changed), TiVo will not reflect that change (which will screw up recording the proper episode).
So, will I leave Overlap Protection turned on on my TiVo -- no, not in its current form. But I
will use the ability to force overlapping programs to both be recorded on occasion. Now all I need to do is fix all the shows that were supposed to be padded that had padding removed (not extremely difficult, but a minor pain nonetheless).
EDIT - After a short while, the padded shows that were clipped
did get removed from my To Do List - no additional effort needed on my part.
