TiVo guide & quirks

1126 Views 4 Replies 4 Participants Last post by mick66, Sep 23, 2007

GoAWest

Discussion Starter · Sep 17, 2007

I've noticed a few guide & log history "quirks" on my TiVos (S2s, 150G HD upgrades) and was wondering about them:

1) When I knew some new shows (pilots) were coming out, I set some wishlists to catch them (would set up a Season Pass later). When the "Program Information To" was showing Wed. 9/26 and nothing had shown up (even though the shows has been announced for M/T/W of that week), I wondered what was going on (note: manually checking the guide also didn't show these shows). And I just noticed this a second time, with shows expected for Thurs. 9/27 not showing up until the guide data reported "Program Information To" Sat. 9/29 (so Thurs. 9/27 & Fri. 9/28 "Program Information To" weren't good enough) at which point the shows showed up in the ToDo list.

Does this mean that the guide data from TiVo (from their contracted company) simply isn't correct, with new corrected info sent later? Or does it mean that the downloaded data isn't reflected in the "Now playing" list for a long time (days?!) after it's downloaded while the TiVo goes thru an indexing process? The "Guide View Cache, Cache To:" still only shows Sun. 9/23, which wouldn't be enough to cover the shows set to record 9/27 which are *now* listed in the ToDo list. ???

2) I've occasionally seen the View Recording History say, and forum reports regarding, "XXX happened because someone in your household canceled/deleted something" when this was totally untrue. I most recently saw it with some Amazon Unbox downloads (some of the free TV pilots), with messages (several minutes apart for two of the three download shows) for several shows saying "The program was not downloaded onto this DVR because someone in your household canceled the transfer" --- wrong, nobody was even *home* during the transfers, and Internet access was probably fine. The three shows did eventually download fine. Was Amazon Unbox overloaded? Was this some retry or timeout issue with a bogus reporting message?

3) One other observation related to those Amazon Unbox TV pilots. Cool to see them in advance, and sans commercials. But the "interesting" thing is, after watching two of them Sat. 9/15 morning, they hadn't auto-deleted themselves by Sun. 9/16 evening and I can still view them (> 32-hours after I has finished watching them the first time). I thought Unbox shows would auto-delete themselves 24-hours after the first viewing, which is why I've never rented one. So is auto-delete timeout a variable or something a content provider can tweak or disable?

Thanks for any info.

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eDbolson

· #2 · Sep 17, 2007

3) The Pilot TV shows are free purchases. So they won't go away like rented movies do. In fact, I don't think Amazon Unbox rents TV shows at all.

1) As far as the problem with finding announced shows on the TiVo search, I've had problems with that, also. And I especially get upset when a network show only shows up on the non-HD channel and I have to manually schedule the HD channel!

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megazone

· #3 · Sep 17, 2007

The 'Guide Data To' tends to be accurate - but NOT all channels report their data as far in advance. So you could have even just one channel with full info out to that date, while other channels still show 'TBA'. You can see that sometimes if you go out to the very end of the guide - some channels with show info, others 'TBA'.

And the guide does update with every download - so if a channel is TBA now, it could have data tomorrow, or the next day. Most channels have data 10+ days out, but sometimes things change - they cancel or move shows, etc - so what you see in the guide now may NOT be what airs. The guide may change between now and then.

And the Guide Cache updates when you use the guide. It doesn't bother caching data that far out since most people don't look that far out in the guide. I believe it will cache more if you use the guide and look out that far, but I'm not sure on that.

2. That's probably a bug. Sometimes the unit seems to pull out the wrong error. As a programmer it is probably an improperly handled error case that falls through to some other case to get the wrong message.

3. The Pilots are *purchases* not rentals, they never expire.

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GoAWest

Discussion Starter · #4 · Sep 23, 2007

Thanks for the insights and clarifications, esp. on the Amazon Unbox items.

On #1, I still believe I have a "case" for long indexing times. I was looking at my To Do list earlier today (9/22, around 8AM) and saw shows thru Tues. 10/2. At the time, the "Program Information To" showed Fri. Oct. 5, 2007 with a "Last Successful" service update of Sept. 22, 12:32AM.. Later in the day I noticed a *new* show in the To Do listed on Wed. 10/3, but the "Program Information To" hasn't changed from Oct. 5 and a "Last Successful" time of Sept. 22, 12:32AM.

So I took a look at the System Info area again and noticed that the Service Map Info and Guide View cache showed times of (approx) Sat. 9/22 5PM, 5AM and 8AM (assorted values for the various fields). So my best guess is that even though the download of the data happened at 12:32AM in the morning, the updated guide data didn't show up, after indexing, until much later in the day (at *least* 8-hours, and maybe up to 16+ hrs if the 5PM number is meaningful).

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mick66

· #5 · Sep 23, 2007

I wouldn't say the 'guide data to' is accurate, but I will say that it is consistant.
In the 3 years that I've had a S2 (and now 3 of them), the guide data has always been reported as 1 day more than was actually there. If it states 10/5, then it will have guide data that ends at 6pm on 10/4 which is how things show today. The zap2it website is the same way. Right now the calendar shows up to 10/7, but the guide data ends at 6pm on 10/6.

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