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Network Scheduling to Mess with Tivo
Yahoo is running a bit about Networks messing with PVRs by adding a minute to shows. If a show runs to 9:01, then you can't Tivo a show on another channel that starts at 9. I've noticed this, although it's less of a factor if you have a dual tuner tivo, but it's interesting to see a bit of mainstream coverage.
I don't think this tactic is specifically used to target TiVo.
The article mentioned people who use VCRs and digital video recorders like TiVos are affected. But I guess putting TiVo in everything is a must now. Imagine an Open Source TiVo-like software that can be installed in iPod to provide time-shifting functionality for old people in Korea.
Anyway, If I had to choose, I would take 30 seconds off the end of the 1st show and 30 seconds off the next one, they're usually opening or trailer for next show.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Stupid 9:59 start time. At least TBS stopped showing everything at :05 and :35.
I have noticed this for about a year and a half now. Most notably on Thursday nights with NBC programming.
ER starts at 8:59, which prevents me from recording CSI on CBS which runs from 8:00 to 9:00.
All TiVo has to do is change its programming a bit. They actually contribute to the conflicts by not allowing you to start recording a program late. Sure you can start recording early, or stop late, but unless you do it completely manually, it is not possible to start late and or end early.
My old VCR used to handle this somewhat more gracefully. If I had a weekly program, say from 7:00 to 8:00, and I had another program that recorded from 7:00 to 7:30, it would record the first program (if it had a higer priority) and then switch channels to record the last half of the other program.
I do not see why TiVo can't simply change the software to "record as much as possible, even if a few minutes are lost" rather than the current model of "even if one minute conflicts, the whole program is abandoned".
Hear that TiVo? Missing features!
As the article summary notes, this isn't a problem for dual-tuner PVRs.
Most PVRs offered by cable and satellite providers, such as Charter's Motorola BMC9012 offering, are just that. And, adding another tuner (or several tuners) to media PCs, such as those running MythTV or the surprisingly good Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, is a simple task (for a person so inclined to have a media PC in the first place).
So, yes, it's interesting to see this acknowledged, but the tactic does show up in the guides (e.g., ER starting at 8:59PM CT), and for multi-tuner PVRs it is not at all an issue.
What will be far more interesting to me is the networks' and content providers' handling and usage of the Broadcast Flag (more, more, more), which will probably be utilized to prevent digital and/or HD recording, and thus prevent (easy) skipping of ad content, of some "high value" shows altogether, as well as allowing the placement (force feeding?) of new shows to piggyback on existing "popular" shows.
Interesting that while the invention of the VCR has been recently lauded as releasing people from the prison of having to watch "prime time" TV in prime time, the Broadcast Flag may essentially shoot us back 20 years. And most consumers don't understand or know the rights that have already been granted them enough to know the difference.
(And why don't content providers understand that: 1. this won't stop pirates from pirating TV, and that 2. this only makes it harder on ordinary consumers?)
That explains why the shows have been getting onto BitTorrent a minute or two later.
Trolling is a art,
I'm sure that this will make the big TV recording group using VCRs really happy as well.
Is it just me or is anyone else LOST ?
Smile.
TV has largely succeded, in the footsteps of Radio, by networks and stations being good about time boundaries. Once anarchy happens, where networks ge into the habit of 5 minutes this or that way, they can pretty much cut their own throats. This was extremely irritating when Turner did it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
TiVo began advising its 2 million subscribers to watch out for such time conflicts and to adjust their recording settings manually.
Couldn't TiVo finish off the first one (maybe 31 minutes), and proceed to record the next despite it's 1 minute late?
Maybe a patch will check for any conflicts and prompt users to choose from a few options, for istance, give weight/priority to a particular show.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
They say it's to put in more commercials and not to disrupt TiVo. CNN had a story about it a while back. They didn't believe it either.
Hmm...I have never had a Tivo but my DishDirect PVR was able to adjust the time manually. TBS or whoever used to do crap like that where I had to manually set the time to something retarded like 5 after. Any time I had a conflict between schedules the one who had time shifted got the shaft so to speak. I won't be watching somethign that messes with me trying to record something else.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
Eventually the cat and mouse game will get so out of hand that you'll have to buy special trunking cable boxes that will follow codes to change the tuning frequency to follow show as it skips channels. Kinda like trying to listen in on police broadcasts these days.
But even then you can only get TV listings in real time as shows will start and stop at random times throughout the day.
Not an issue if you only watch one channel.
Oh look, it's Colonel Carter in a slick leather outfit!
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Yes. I'd like to see soft scheduling. If the tuner isn't in use for something else I'd like it to record an extra five minutes before and after the show I'm interested in.
I'd also like to see these PVRs available with four tuners.
When was the last time there were two or more shows on two or more different big networks in the same night that were interesting enough to record?
It's all Hood
I know many people who only watch TV through their PVRs (be it TV, whatever) because *gasp* they have lives aside from the boob tube.
This move basically ensures that the networks decrease the number of eyeballs watching their shows.
I wonder if they even care, though, if those eyeballs are skipping the ads anyway.
If you know you are going to miss the last 3-4 minutes of a show, you might be less likely to TIVO it.
1. Add minutes to end of shows
2. Decrease TIVO usage
3. More viewers see more commericals
4. Profit.
It makes perfect sense.
The other thing that people forget is that TBS has been doing this for a while. If you are "kept" at one channel for 5 minutes longer, you are going to miss the beginnings of the "hooker" beginner part of shows on other channels.
Ever since I started using a VCR I've been the recording from 2 or 3 minutes before the show starts to 2 or 3 minutes after it ends to make up for the VCR time not being consistant with the show time.
Technoli
If the shows start substantively overlapping, it will affect live viewers as much or more than TiVo users. A human can only watch one show at once, just like a TiVo. (Of course a human WITH a TiVo can finish one show while recording the start of another, then catch up on the second by skipping commercials :) For this reason, I think the trend will be limited.
I have been using Beyond Tv for some time now, and it allows you the simple option of padding a recording by X amount of minutes before or after a program start time. I can't imagine it would take much for Tivo to implement something like that.
TiVo should be able to automatically record a show that is one minute already in progress.
The logic will need to be fuzzed a bit and adjusted to account for this. As it stands, the TiVo software will not consider recording a show already in progress unless the user forces it. The software will need to be made more intelligent so as to consider a show only one minute into it, for all intents and purposes, as being right at the start.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
I have no problem with this, AS LONG AS THEY PUT THE CORRECT TIMES ON THE SCHEDULE.
If the show runs from 9:00 - 10:01, then don't list 9:00 - 10:00 in the schedule.
If the times were correct, then Tivo would be able to figure it out.
I don't watch TV.
Ha! Take that, Networks!
3 tuners DVRs to compensate!
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Just don't let TiVo change their 30 sec commerical skip code.
I'll miss a few shows as long as I can blast away commericals from my remote control.
But a human watching live can flip between the channels more accurately. If you're watching CSI, you can immediately flip over to ER once the credits start to roll, etc. You'll be much more accurate than a PVR.
I've noticed this as well.
Sometimes they will run a show 1 or 2 minutes later than posted so you miss the ending. This really gets me pissed. I've actually stopped watching a few shows because of this and I simply will not record anything from TBS because they are very consistent about missing their posted times.
TV for me is a luxury and not a necessity. If the channels don't work in such a way that my TiVO doesn't record them, I go someplace else. Considering the PVR's (particularly TiVO) is about to start reporting their recording stats to the network broadcasters, I think it would be smart for them not to screw with the TiVO people.
There are definitely a number of channels and shows that I've stopped watching because the posting timetable is consistently wrong by up to 5 minutes. Using TiVO, I don't really see how I could go back to watching all that crap at the peak hours of my day.
networks have been doing this since before PVRs, its just more noticeable (and annoying) now.
placating their CEO's salaries and screwing their customers. You can have your reality show of the month crap programming. I have my pr0n and I'm more than happy. Plus it's a one time fee with no commercials.
I say we just grow up, be adults and die.
Reminds me of when I was in Germany - networks scheduled everything all over the place, there was no such thing as everyone starting and ending on the half hour. Makes me think that we're kind of lucky that the networks here play rather nice in comparison.
I just bought a Tivo a month ago (thanks to the $100 rebate), and I've noticed that things happen that can royally screw up the Tivo experience. I don't think the first one is the network's fault, but when live events go over their time alloted, everything gets pushed back, and if your Tivo is going to record from 8-9pm, you will miss that 15-30 minutes the "live event" (football game) went over. I have also noticed what the front page summary mentioned, and it is incredibly annoying, but I don't think they're doing it a lot because it can mess up many other things (traditional VCR tapers). I was thinking the other day about how much effort it would be to screw over a Tivo user, and the answer is apparently not much. I expect more tricks like this will happen as more people adopt Tivo. Of course, I'm sure the manufacturers of DVRs will answer back, and as people have already mentioned, you can fix these problems if you have a dual-tuner recorder (but some of us don't have that kind of spare cash).
TBS Superstation (WTBS, at least originally) started shows at 5 minutes after the hour starting back in the early 80s. They had the same idea 20 years ago.
This is not news.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
If one program concludes at 5min past the hour and the other starts on the hour and you don't have a TIVO or VCR, well now you need one!
If you want to time shift, now you need TWO machines.
I bet the hardware vendors are secretly smiling because most consumers are too stupid to apply anything other than the brute force, buy more $hit solution.
IMO, more people are 'addicted' to TV than to cigarettes, crack, food, tentacle rape, and opossum fishing COMBINED!
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
This can be worked around. NBC has been scheduling ER to start at 9:59 for ages. I have my TiVo set to record ER from 10 to 11. If I miss a minute of "previously on ER", I'm not concerned.
You do have to either watch your To Do list or look for alerts on webites like TivoCommunity.com
NBD, really.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
I remember when TBS would start their shows at 5 minutes after the hour and 35 minutes after the hour for some strange reason. Maybe to try and skew their ratings?
It's clearly intentional. They tell you "Tune in at 9:59! You don't want to miss a minute of ER!" They want people hooked on their channel before shows on the other channels start, OR they want you to stick around late so that you'll miss the starts of other shows.
Uh...maybe you should look at a TiVo before you make such definitive statements with a lack of knowledge.
TiVo most certainly does have the ability to start/stop early by variable amounts of time.
Elgato's EyeTV system allows you to set the amount of time before and after the scheduled show time for padding, as well as manually adjust program times. I have not had any problems with anything I record, but I only really record about 5 shows regularly, so I might have just lucked out.
TiVo just really needs to have greater flexibility on scheduling is what it comes down too. I have also noticed this with ER and CSI too. It drives me crazy!
ours is bundled with satellite, so we have one in each room. This allows us to avoid the schedule issue.
Jeoin
Seems more to be anti competitive to other networks than to prevent it from being recorded.
I don't think this is so much a problem with the networks as it is a flaw with current TiVo setups... if I can have more than one TV watching two different channels with cable, then TiVo should be able to have an internal splitter to record more than one show at a time. Maybe there's technical limitations (not powerful enough to encode both videos in real time), but I doubt it. More like TiVo being a bastard.
Their show descriptions are rarely actually what they are showing, eg Classic in Concert was listed as Bruce Hornsby - turned out to be Duran Duran. Shows that are listed when taped turn out to be something entirely different...
If CSI runs until 10:02, and ER starts RIGHT AT 10 like they do, it is very likely my wife will take the laptop off my lap and hurl it through our TV.
It's bad enough with those two anyway if you're a fan of both. This is a problem for regular people who want to watch one thing at 9 and something else on another network at 10.
Thank you guys, thank you for reminding me why I pay for CABLE. Assclowns.
I like music
Doesn't this affect the average tv viewer as well? I am watching ER from 8:00 to 9:01 and then I want to change the channel to watch (insert other popular program here) that airs from 9:00 to 10:00, I've just missed the first minute of the second show. Of course thats not a problem if you only watch one network, maybe that is what they are trying to promote more than fcking with TiVos.
Why don't they just go ahead and send a high voltage spike down the cable line, that would "fix" the Tivo.
Forget TIVO! That screws with my VCR. It's to the point where if it's not a show I really care about I stop watching. What's really funny is that I'm a Nielson member!! So, guess what happens to that show's ratings since I've decided to watch or Video tape them anymore.
Nor can you watch all of both shows when they air. They are not just screwing the Tivo users, they are screwing up their core customers, the ones who watch live, commercials and all. This is hardly a new practice, Fox has been starting the Simpsons early for years. But it certainly is growing in it's adoption. It's not just a minute either, in many cases (at least with NBC) it's several, and those minutes can be on either end (the show might start early, or end late).
Rather than hurting the TIVO users, this pratice may well drive more normal viewers to becoming multiple tuner TiVo users (and skipping the commercials in the process).
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The History Channel keeps you watching by removing the commerical break between the ending credits of one show, and the opening teaser of another show, so you get roped right into the next show.
While that might cause some time conflicts because the padding from the commercial break isn't there to cut some slack, it is a lot better than this early starting crap.
When we first got a TiVo they were doing something like this, but it wasn't on purpose. My housemate was considering starting a mail-in campaign where we sent all the TV stations a cheap plastic digital watch, so they could keep time.
Someone had to do it.
Last time I looked (because of this kind of issue), my TiVo only lets me adjust the stop time, but it is from Series 1. Did they change this in Series 2?
What you're talking about is called "soft padding", and it's a feature that TiVo owners have been asking for for years. You can already do "hard padding", but manually specifying some number to adjust the start and/or stop time of a recording. This was designed for clock skew, but it's also being used for shows that habitually start or end late or early.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
you mean the show right? i noticed that show seems to lose the last 30 seconds or so, let alone a preview of what's coming next week. because i only grab a few shows off and on i have not noticed it really on other things i record..... but then again adult Swim stuff is so short anyway i would just miss the in between goofyness and not important cartoons. as for the show lost, i just added 5 minutes to the manual recording since i dont try to record anything right after it.
for the record i don't tivo very much, i actually dont subscribe to the service, i just got a bare bones to replace a broken VCR. since i watch what i record, then delete it, a dumb mode tivo made more sense to me than another VCR. maybe i am not noticing other shows/networks doing this.
The post was talking about start/stop late, not early. If you can start late then you can avoid a conflict with another show that run one minute over.
Your suggestion of recordin before and after based on availability is a good one. I know someone at Tivo pretty well and will suggest that to him.
There is an application for folks who've hacked their Tivo (I think only series 1's), that can help with this issue thoough. Called endpad. Here's a link to the announcement on the tivo community forums: Forums. This is especially useful for single tuner Tivos (as mentioned above).
Actually on my TiVo box I can specify if I want to start recording a show X-number of minutes early or late and if I want it to run long, etc. So maybe you're running an old box or maybe you don't know how to use your TiVo ;)
News at 10:59
Yes, this is known as negative padding (starting late or ending early). Both TiVo and ReplayTV allow positive padding (starting early or ending late).
ObOnion reference: "Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television."
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
All their shows started at :05 and :35. I always thought it was funny, until I realised that you would never miss the begining of their shows, and always miss the begining of other channel's shows. It's the same kind of low cunning behind "$10.99"... really only effective if not everyone does it.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
My wife tends to watch shows like this, and we've noticed the same thing. Networks tend to run shows a minute or so off, and since shows now start immediately (with the opening credits rolling several minutes into the show) it can be aggravating. To combat this, we do one of the following :
1. Watch the opposing show on the station in a different time zone. We get channels from other broadcast cities, and since we're in Dallas it is easy to catch a show on the L.A. channels an hour or two later. We can also record the later show if nothing else is on that we want to watch.
2. Usenet. Most, if not all, of the popular shows are available in DivX (or similar) format the next morning. I simply cue up the shows and burn a couple to a CD or DVD, then play back on our Philips DVP642. That way if there's a night that's slow for TV shows, we can just catch up on what we missed the other night.
Option 1 is more preferable from the network execs' standpoint. Option 2 is more preferable from our standpoint since we get to keep the shows and watch them at our convenience, even if that means on my laptop while dinner is cooking, etc.
At somepoint, the networks need to realize that WE WANT OUR PROGRAMMING OUR WAY. We don't always mind commercials, we don't mind in-show advertising (I don't personally, YMMV), but we mind you playing games with us and hindering our ability to watch a simple show on the television.
Note: We only have one PVR in the house. The equipment fee to "rent" one from Dish is not overly expensive, but we (read: I) prefer to spend the money on Usenet and blank CDs.
way to treat your god damned audience. why bdo they make these shows at all? how many times do you miss the end of your favorite program before you give up and watch something else?
What model TiVo do you have? I have a couple series 2 TiVos, and it has 'start early' and 'stop late'. It does not have the ability to 'start late' or 'stop early'. (for recording a program from the guide. Manual recordings are another matter.)
A big advantage for using nonstandard start and end times for real popular shows, is that it locks viewers into watching other programming on the same network by creating conflicts with the beginnings and endings of other shows. So if ER ends 2 minutes late (just an example, I don't watch it so I don't know), by watching ER to the end you miss the start of shows on other networks, making it more likely that you'll watch the show that ER leads into. I've been told that the Japan networks had a battle royal like this years ago, that completely screwed up the tv schedules.
I think frustrating Tivo users is just an added bonus.
Cache Rules Everything Around Me
I can't image execs going for adding a minute to the shows themselves. That would take too much thinking outside the box (no pun intended). Those capitalist bastards add comercials to shows. Think about it, you pay extra money for the studio time and editing or you take a pay off from budweiser for another couple comercials. They have a hard enough time putting a quality product on the air. Can you say "reality show".
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
i wonder if they realize they are helping to spread the adoption of bittorrent users sharing shows?
Have you seen Ironstayn vs Supergovernment yet?
I don't watch any network tv anymore, but I've noticed that on cable, most tv shows actually end about 5 minutes before the end time. Then there's 5 minutes of ads before the next show starts.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
That large companies don't care what their customers want. Isn't capitalism supposed to be about supply and demand?
Oops. Demand with no supply. Now how can that be? Maybe it's NOT A FREE MARKET?!?
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Here's what I do on Wednesdays when I TiVo Lost from 8 to 9:01 on ABC and King of Queens on CBS from 9:01 to 9:30...
Record Lost normally. Selecting by title, channel, or time. Then do a manual recording by time to record from 9:05 until 9:30. In the properties of the manual recording, I can then choose to start recording 4 minutes earlier (at 9:01). This way, I record both shows with no conflict on only 2 minutes extra TiVoing.
Nickelodeon has been doing this for a while. all there shows are way off. They have a block of 3-4 hours where shows are just lumped in with hosts that talk between the shows.
I watched TV last night wihtout a PVR and it was horrible. At this point I would rather not pay the $60+ per month for TV and simply download my favorite 2 shows.
Just wait until ALL the networks use this strategy.
Program TiVos to keep a minute or two on each side.
Problem solved.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
Jesus fucking Christ what the hell is wrong with these shitheads? What next? Is everything these retards do designed to alienate and piss off their own customers? First we can't record what we want when we want to soon we won't be able to zap the commercials on our own machines. It's bad enough that there is steadily less and less actualy content - what, about 18 minutes per half hour once you strip out the commericials the jingle, the credits? It's not bad enough there's a gigantic animated bug in the lower right corner of the screen and crawl across the bottom. Now they want to make sure that I don't watch the beginning and/or the end of any show?
What next? Super premium extra fee channels that compress everything into recordable timeslots?
I want them dead, I want them all dead. I want their women raped their children enslaved their houses fucking burned to the ground.
CAN WE ALL QUIT CALLING THIS TECHNOLOGY "TVIO". TiVo is the brand name! This drives me crazy! The technology is called PVR (personal video recorder).
It's simple, I put the season passes of shows which do this at a lower priority than normally scheduled shows. If a show goes over, or starts early, and I have another show that I want, it will get the other. No conflict, then I get it.
Sure, Tivo doesn't record one episode of my season pass, but it's the network's scheduling at fault. I just won't watch their programming that night. Once re-runs come around, it will automatically record the episode which I haven't seen yet. VOILA.
We all know that my viewing habbits are somewhat tracked by tivo. Therefore networks will discover that I won't put up with their crap. - click, channel changed.
Hasn't TBS (or is it TNT) been doing this for years? They always had the funny (maybe stupid?) :05 or :35 based schedule, so you either waisted 5 minutes at the beginning (of commercials, usually) or might loose the last few minutes if you switch to another (normal) channel.
Homer no function beer well without.
They did this once before- they started programs a minute early. This threw off recording devices and you would miss the first minute or so of the program. DISH Network (echostar) got around this by adding a checkbox to start one minute early.
I expect it would be just as easy to add a "start one minute late" checkbox.
Some stations purposely (doesn't TBS still do this?) start their programs 5 minutes after the hour to catch channel surfers.
I have found that recordings (Tivo, etc) can be affected when the station you are recordings clock is a little off as well.
I have wanted a custom timer start/stop option for some time. Sure, being able to "point and click" is nice, but adding a pre/delay would be an excellent value add at little cost to the manufacturers.
Geez, if a $29.00 VCR can start/stop anytime, why can't a $200 Tivo?
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
when companies resort to actively making things difficult for customers it often spells the beginning of the end. or at least the destruction of any brand loyalty.
I for one do not watch TV any more. I get my favourite shows (of which there are less than 5) via file sharing. imo TV isn't worth the effort. before the screams of piracy come in, I buy a lot of TV on DVD but that's usually released at least a year after broadcast.
I could have sworn there was at least one other brand...
"although it's less of a factor if you have a dual tuner tivo,"
And no factor if you own a ReplayTV, except that you miss a minute of one of the shows. The one exception was the last episode of friend where they lied to the schedulers and had the climax of the show occur right after the scheduled end of the show. Knowing the network, I assumed they would do this and made sure the show after would be recorded to, though I could have just told by Replay to record a few extra minutes.
I've noticed this behaviour in programming lately, but doesn't seem to affect things too much. I have a bigger problem trying to grab important life-or-death shows that air after sporting events, like The Simpsons.... Doh, must... renew... ....Netflix.
Slashmail.org "The Open Source Email Company"
On topic, I'm surprised the TV networks would stoop to that. It's the continued little inconveniences media keeps adding to their 'product' that turns people to alternative sources, even if questionably illegal (downloads)
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
Actually on my TiVo box I can specify if I want to start recording a show X-number of minutes early or late and if I want it to run long, etc. So maybe you're running an old box or maybe you don't know how to use your TiVo ;)
Or maybe you have a magic TiVo box that none of the rest of the world does. TiVo allows you to start recording early, or stop recording late, but you can't start recording late/stop recording early.
I.E. You can make the TiVo record longer the the show is, but you can't make it record shorter than the show is, unless you set the show to record with a manual start/stop time. (Which is dumb for those 1 minute over shows)
Right now I download my episodes of Lost online, because they were running a minute over and screwing up the shows that came after them. I record LAX in that timeslot instead.
Do you Gentoo!?
This is the same tactic that TBS used in the '90s to keep viewer lock. All shows on TBS started and ended at 5 after the hour or half hour. The only difference now is that instead of really missing the beginning of a show on another channel, the DVR is not set up to handle a WHOLE MINUTE of scheduling conflicts. However, you can adjust start and stop times for the Tivo, but that is another step in the process, and most end users would rather complain than be forced to do more work. (Tivo is about convenience, right? Right?)
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
Same here.
I'm wondering how long before some bright CEO decides that they can cut out the distribution network and provide straight to the consumer.
BitTorrent/NetFlix take care of all my TV needs. I also wonder if NetFlix could not distribute instead of the cable company. For a fee send me a DVD a week with the latest XYZ show on it. Would seem to b a huge business waiting to be tapped.
The networks make money to produce these shows how? While it would be very entertaining to imagine them pulling the money from their greedy backsides, the fact is the money comes through ad revenue.
Now, if there is an increase in use of devices which reduce the number of eyeballs a network can claim were focused on an advertisement, the value of that ad space has now also gone down. Even if we're talking about a few million using these devices out of the entire population, that number will only increase if nothing is done. Remember, the VCR is/was relatively "stupid". It required programming, and lets face it the majority of the Viewing Public is only a few IQ points above being watered thrice weekly! A TiVo, OTOH, is getting easier and easier and you can search out those programs you want to view and it will record as needed.
Where was I? Off rambling... Ah yes!
They see their gravy train potentially getting derailed! What if they go to a potential ad sale and say "We know that $BIGNUM viewers will see this show, and they will by and large be tech savvy with lots of money" and the advertiser decides against, fearing a large number of TiVo/PVR users? And what if the networks see that happen MORE and MORE often?
What then? Will TV become more and more like Pay Per View? Will there be more "subscription only" channels?
While I love the TiVo and loath advertising, what we are seeing is tantamount to an organism (granted, a parasitic and repulsive one) doing what it can to survive. Or, in this case, remain fat, slimy and repugnant.
You have several choices for free Linux or Windows PVR applications, and they keep getting better. Usually, all you need to have a Tivo alternative at your fingertips is a $100 TV Tuner Card with an MPEG decoder.
After 12 months you will have saved $60 on subscription fees, anyway.
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
Trust me, he's already heard about "soft padding". You should instead ask him why they haven't implemented it yet, considering that TiVo owners have wanted it for years now.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
...you are not their customer. advertisers are.
what is going on with the spelling here? I'm not very anyed, but i'm slightly annoyed.
For context, click Parent.
It's tactics like this that will encourage the masses to quit paying for cable/sattelite tv, and begin getting all their shows from bittorrent (and other illicit p2p networks).
If piracy is the only option to get commercial free tv, so be it.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
This screwed us last night. Our favorite show, LOST, goes to 9:01. The ending was a real shocker... but we missed it, beause the Tivo cut out just seconds before the big dramattic ending. It was beyond obnoxious.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
Five minutes before and after is how I have my TV tuner scheduled to record Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis episodes. Moreso for compensation for time differences (between 9:00PM at SciFi and 9:00PM here).
It would honestly surprise me if they've never considered something so obvious. One minute before, one minute after? Bah, they could've implemented that years ago and I'd never have noticed.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
We are the PRODUCT my friend, as surely bought and paid for as any box of laundry detergent, or any slave.
The only customers the networks have is the advertisers.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
Tivo has positive padding, but needs negative padding to work well with 2 shows in a row.
You are allowed to start ER 1 minute early. (example: 7:59) Except that's a comflict when you record CSI from 7 to 8:00. (You can't double record that same minute) So obviously the solution is to have CSI stop recording 1 minute early. And that's where TIVO fails.
The alternative is to set up manual recording for both shows to start/end on the hour. That sucks for shows that might move around, etc, and then it'll also record non-new shows since it's no longer a season pass. But at least now they're labeling the manual recordings with the show name.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
Sigh...
Cause everyone wants a free Xbox360
and stick with the accurate times. This is probably impossible due to commercials, live shows, etc. though. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The networks think they're being crafty by blocking you from watching their competitors' shows but they don't realize that their scheme only works if the Season Pass for their show has the highest priority.
NBC might think they're being crafty by scheduling The Apprentice from 9:00 - 10:01, hoping that bumps my recording of Without a Trace which airs from 10:00 - 11:00. What happens, though, is that Without a Trace is a higher priority so The Apprentice is the show that doesn't get recorded. So, their nifty little plan actually lost them a viewer instead of CBS. Way to go, guys!
When violence rules the world outside / And the headlines make me want to cry / It's not the time to just keep quiet
I've removed all such shows from my subscription list. Hopefully, the networks will get the hint.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
ABC has fucked me by ending "Lost" at 9:01 on Wednesday, preventing the TiVo from immediately switching to Discovery to record "Mythbusters." Luckily Discovery reruns their prime time shows later the same night, so I can usually pick them up then if something else isn't due to be recorded at that time.
Memo to assholes in charge at the networks:
Listen, fucktards, you're not going to prevent me from watching what I want, when I want. You keep making my TiVo miss shows with your little scheduling tricks, and I'll just stop recording them on the TiVo and start downloading them via Bittorrent, with your precious commercials already edited out so I don't even have to skip them. FOAD.
Or he could be a boneheaded Beta Tester. We have seen a few of them show up here and directly or indirectly bragging about the capabilities that their box has that ours doesn't.
PS You now have a free timeslot there. LAX met the chopping axe a couple of weeks ago.
You can do this with TiVo. Set you primary program to record normally and add 1 minute(say 7-8:01pm) then do a "record by time" from 8:02pm to 9:02pm on the other channel. I do it all the time, it's in their manual.
"I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator"-Adolf Hitler or George W Bush?
Oh my God! I've missed the first 18 seconds of this week's episode of "Don't Go There!" starring David Faustino! My life will never be complete! AAAARRRGGGHHH!!!
You can play the game of trying to reprogram your TIVO to keep up with the network's changes, but why bother?
It seems that most television these days are just crappy reality TV shows, and tired formulaic sitcoms. Other than the Daily Show, I haven't missed much TV since I stopped watching it.
This isn't a tirade against watching TV in general, I just found that most of the content these days isn't worth the time it takes to watch it. Shouldn't the networks be making it SIMPLER to consume their product with all the activities that compete for people's free time these days?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
If the networks are publishing accurate Program Guide data, the problem is that single-tuner DVR's can't cope with the overlapping shows. (However, if they are publishing Program Guide data that differs from their actual broadcast schedule, then NO DVR or VCR could cope with that, and that seems like grounds for a lawsuit.)
We have a Digeo Moxi DVR through Charter Cable, and it is integrated with two Digital Cable tuners, so conflicts like these are significantly reduced. ReplayTV or TiVo, on the other hand, are "standalone" boxes that only have one tuner, so coping with these kinds of conflicts is much more difficult.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
TV exists to serve my Playstation!
All bow before the almighty Playstation! All hail its non-commercial existance! Revel in the glory that is engaging, interactive content!
That green slime had it coming.
PS You now have a free timeslot there. LAX met the chopping axe a couple of weeks ago.
D'oh, the wife really enjoyed that show. (I thought it was pretty good too.) We'll prolly continue to download the Lost episodes though, because my wife also likes Jack and Bobby. (starts at 9:00)
Do you Gentoo!?
I used to be a switcher for a local PBS affiliate. In the old days network shows ALWAYS started exactly on the hour or half hour right down to the second. You could literally set your clock to a start of a network show.
The first network I noticed which deviated from this was MTV. I'd tune in to watch Daria, which was supposed to start at 10:00, only to discover that it had already been going for ten minutes.
But it's pretty clear that all networks do it now. Just last week I sat my son down to watch a Scooby Doo movie set for 7:00. It had already started a full 15 minutes earlier!
Now when I set up a record on my homebuilt PVR, I set it to start 15 minutes early and an additional 15 minutes late.
I'd love to make a joke about affirmative action and BPT, but I'm too politically correct for that.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Somewhat off-topic, but related...and I feel like ranting.
:O
I don't understand why people are freaking out about Tivo and other PVR/DVR systems. I'll be the first to admit, I'm a jerk about copyright infringement. Music, software, etc, etc. I've been getting a lot better now that I'm not a poor highschool or college student, but I DO have a bad track record.
With that said, however, never once did I even ponder the idea of either downloading OR uploading recorded TV shows. Why? Because they're already freely available. There is nothing I need to see THAT BADLY that I can't just tell SageTV to record the next time it pops up and go about my business. If I won't be able to see it for a year or so until they slide it into the re-runs, and I positively have to see it, I'll purchase the season (ala SG-1).
Why would I want to download a show recorded by someone else when I can get the exact same thing for myself without almost any effort? Aside from the fact that I may get a kick out of their crazy local commercials that may or may not appear on it, there's absolutely no reason for me to do this.
As for skipping advertisements, which I know is the real worry; keep things in perspective. Yes, I do fastforward through commercials (when I'm not too lazy to pick up the remote (now THAT is lazy!)). But even if I didn't have that option, you can bet your ass I would spin my chair around and turn some music on while muting the TV, or using the bathroom, or making a sandwich, or throwing socks at my cat in an effort to make him freak out. I don't feel like I'm anything unusual here; most people are the same way. Would I download a movie? Yes. Would I download a TV show? No. Could others? Yes. But I've been seeing avi's of The Simpsons floating around on my campus network since 2000. The more PVRs, the better, because now people aren't sharing, they're making these recordings themselves.
I'm sure there's a point in there somewhere. Or at least I hope so. If not, at least I may be able to start a discussion.
Isn't this exactly what will kill off legitimate (paid) TV viewing and encourage everyone to simply go to the internet to download TV programs, without commercials?
Why don't vendors, of any kind, realize that the more you piss off your customers, the more they will run away to alternatives?
The above statement is 100% bang on...the purpose of television is to provide a forum for advterisers to hock their wares to as large an audience as possible. The purpose of television is not to be entertaining, it just happens to be that the best way to provide large audiences is to provide an entertaining show.
A simple solution to this problem is just quit watching the brain rotting device known as TeleVision. A few alternatives to television would be read a few good books, become an active member of the community, go to a theatre to watch a play once in a while, go to a concert.
The money that is saved by getting rid of cable/satellite could be put into a 401K (assuming the person works for a company that has a 401K plan), donate to a charity of your choice, a few gifts for that special someone, etc.
I have not had cable for almost a year now, and I don't miss it one bit.
I remember when TBS used to have all their shows start and end at 5 or 35 minutes after the hour. Not only does it make it difficult to switch to other shows already in progress it also gave TBS their own subheading in the TV Guide so their shows didn't get lost in the huge list which usually had bigger networks listed first. That was probably 20 years ago. Don't know when they switched to normal hourly schedules. Now that lots of people use on-screen listings the guide advantage is gone.
thus increasing the number of Bit Torrent Downloads proportionaly. (Which will then be burnt to disks, saved forever, without comercials)
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
While I don't have a tivo I have a computer running linux with dual tv tuner cards and this was one of my main incentives for wanting a second tuner. This happens a lot.
Also a lot of the time shows start early. I usually record a 30 minute long show for 32 minutes from the minute before to the minute after and haven't had a problem in ages. My first tuner is a nicer one so the second one is only used when it has to be, sadly that's quite a bit nowadays.
I'm thinking of getting a card like the PVR-350 to fix that problem though. Another thing I do a lot is record for times like 29:55 instead of 30:00 so then I can record 2 shows right after one another without conflicts. If you only leave a second or so in between two recordings it ends up failing. My tv script will kill anything accessing the v4l device then sleep for a few seconds if something is accessing it, then kill -9 if it still hasn't died, but this is for worst case scenarios.
One thing that's nice though is that a lot of channels play a set of shows twice, usually after an interval of 3-4 hours. Discovery channel and adult swim do this. This means if you have a conflicting show you can grab it at the later time, if necessary. Of course this only works in some situations.
If you have a bunch of shows in a row on a single network you can just record them all as one big recording although this is a bad idea in my case because of the 2GB avi file size limit...I usually have to break things up around 2-3 hours.
If you don't want someone to copy something, don't give it to anyone.
Amanda Tapping... mmmmmmm....
While I'm sure that dicking with PVR owners is a side effect that the networks like. I beleive that the realy reason for this is to squeeze yet another minute of commercials into popular shows. Unfortunatly for the networks this tactic will have the effect of driving more people to the Internet to download their shows totally free of commercials.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Tivo Can do that!
Just not out of the box.
With TivoWebPlus you can set it to start Late or early (unlike the tivo UI), and end early or late (or even.. gasp on time).
Sure it requires a bit of hacking, but the side effect it you can schedule recordings via the web (w/o using tivos HMO features).
-Jason
The new MythTV 0.16 has this feature. Note the change log on this page http://www.mythtv.info/moin.cgi/WhatsNew
New Recording Options Screen The advanced recording options screen has been given a much needed make over. The various Qt controls are gone and the dialog is now themeable. Recording options are now set using a list control. The options are grouped into categories and can be selected using the arrow keys and the SELECT button. For simple items such as the start early/end late options you can just use left/right to increment them. For list types such as the recording group selection you can scroll through the options with left/right or press SELECT to see a list of the items and select which one you want. Items that can be scrolled left or right have arrows pointing to the left and/or right.
I think their schedule has been offset by 5 minutes for decades
Beginning to be very glad I didn't buy a Tivo and got a ReplayTV instead. When you schedule a show from say, 8:00 - 9:00 and you know the show will run over a bit, in the advanced options you can pad the beginning of the show or the end of the show by several minutes, and when its done recording you can still switch to the next show thats scheduled to record automatically. While you may lose any crossover between the two you still get most of the shows. And frankly the beginning of most shows are a lot less important then the endings. As far as 30 second skip, there's a button on the remote that does this admirably. It even stops when you smash it a bunch when it hits a commercial/show boundary (chapters)...on most show the chapter advance button lets you skip the whole slew of commercials outright, although a few shows I watch are missing some of them =P. Best part tho is the network jack in the back, I guess Tivos have this now but they didn't when i bought it. Full control over all functions via a clever Java App. All hail PVR/DVR/Tivo-clones
We've secretely replaced the Enterprise's dilithium crystals with Folgers crystals. Lets see if they notice.
I'm almost certain that any loses incurred in this manner will be claimed as loses due to piracy. Most executives have their heads jammed so far up their asses I'm surprised their sycophants managed to fit their tongues in - so marketing and research will back up anything the network executives want to believe.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
This is also a problem with Replay TV units. If a show goes over the 30/60 minute mark, then you can't record some other show that begins even 1 second earlier. Though it is evil on the part of the networks to do such a thing on purpose, the fault for the problem lies with the developer of the Replay TV/Tivo software.
The Replay TV unit's conflict resolution facility is nonexistent. It's totally pathetic. If you try to schedule a show that conflicts with another, it simply asks "do you really want to do this?" and that's it. That's fine if the shows completely overlap, but it's really lame for it to behave this way if the shows only overlap by one minute. There is no good reason it can't skip the first minute of a 60 minute show and simply record the remaining 59 minutes!
What's worse is that the unit may not detect scheduling conflicts at the moment you create the recording schedule, because sometimes shows change timeslots. If you tell it to do so, it will record your show at any time, but if it ends up conflicting with another show you have scheduled to record, then it is undefined which one will win the conflict. I can't count the number of times I've missed recording something important because it unexpectedly conflicted with my kid's Elmo recording or somesuch. You should be able to prioritize shows, so that the ones you really, really want don't get preempted by some other crappy show.
My VCR, which I finally decommissioned this week after a year of non-use, lame though it may be, does not suffer from these problems. It actually has reasonable behavior when two shows collide. It lets you schedule them both, and records whichever happens to 1) start first, or 2) be at the top of the recording list. So this ancient dinosaur of a device has solved the problem perfectly and simply, and my top of the line technology doesn't even have the most basic ability to deal with scheduling problems. What will it take to get these guys to implement such an obvious solution?
Good job getting modded insightful my friend. I think it's a record for sheer number of incendiary words not being modded troll. :)
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Video links were expensive enough that AT&T did some of the video switching at regional switch points in the distribution chain. When a network switched from New York origination to Los Angeles origination, AT&T was involved. So everybody had to be agreed on a tight schedule in advance.
Then came frame buffers and cheap digital transmission. Now, there are so many frame buffers in the chain you may be a second behind by the time it gets to the screen. Everybody has dedicated links. And synchronization fanaticism is a thing of the past.
What ever happened to picture-in-a-picture technology? That's just 2 tuners.
How much extra does it cost to add a 2nd or 3rd tuner to a DVR? Yeah, there's some can-we-write-several-programs-at-once-to-disk issues, but those are minor and can be compensated for in software by degrading the recording.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That could be interesting. Not sure how much it would cost, but running numbers from (yes I have no life) the Buffy TV show (cost 1.4-2.0 million per episode, 3.8 million viewers) would cost 2$ per episode. Which is ironic, since the DVDs sell for a little bit more than that.
However, there's most of a cost than that. The networks use certain shows to prop up others, give them exposure, pay for the prerequisite hookers&blow, exec salaries, show off the network, etc. All that goes away - there's just a show, which the networks hate. Hence stuff like "must-see Thursdays". And there's a limit - would you pay $10 a week to watch 5 shows you like, considering that you still need cable to watch anything else that's on?
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
And sometimes it's not even true. Last night's "Lost" was scheduled until just after 9pm here (according to my Myth box). That bumped "The West Wing" off the recording schedule. But here's the kicker: Lost didn't actually run long. It ended well before 9pm, and the Myth box recorded the ads, closing credits, and the intro to the next program.
What's with that?
M>
I ran into this issue lastnight, I just told mythtv to stop recording the show 1 minute early and the problem was solved.
Icemaann
http://www.nugg.org
I have a Cox DVR that can record two channels at the same time. I haven't had any issues with the overscheduling yet.
If I tell it to record a program, and that program is from 9:00-10:01, it will record to 10:01 like it is supposed to.
I always use this option for sporting events that have the potential to go into overtime.
I know this interferes with your ability to record something immediately after a show you're recording for a few extra minutes, but (1) how often are you recording programs in succession and (2) if you are, Tivo can always pick it up on the next showing (e.g. HBO reruns everything 4 times week at least) or (3) you can specify a manual time/channel combination if the program will not be shown again.
Just my 2 cents as a very happy owner of 3 Tivos ...
This reminds me of the time when they added that extra "filler" signal to fool VCRs into not recording a show.
So buy you hd3000 card now while it's still legal. Or there's that new USB HDTV tuner, someone write a Linux driver for that thing. Just be sure you buy a tuner of some sort before July.
It's a moving target. We keep getting more channels and those channels keep using more bandwidth (i.e. HD). It is also a heat issue. With all of those (80+) tuners in there the box would be too noisy with fans to disburse the generated heat.
Why I buy DVD season sets of TV shows. Better picture, no commercials, and no care when the broadcast show airs or how much off from hour or half-hour boundaries it runs.
Of course if everybody only bought the DVD sets, the broadcast episodes would have poor ratings and the show would get cancelled and never be released on DVD. I wonder if direct to DVD "television" shows could be economically feasible.
Sounds like a good reason to stop recording network television on my Tivo...of the few shows on the "Big Three" that I record...
You provide a link to your wife resume, but no pictures of her.
Is she fat or something? I mean, she does cute drawings and stuff, but I've got to assume she'll pretty much do anything for you to put up with that shit.
A) TiVo sucks. If you're not going to use something like mythTV, then get a Replay.
B) Free Network television is on its deathbed. Seriously, there's only two network shows I care to watch and that's Conan and Law & Order. Everything else is total crap. Cable TV is where its at. HBO has the best series' on television with stuff like The Wire, The Sopranos, and Entourage. Of course, stuff like Discovery and the History channel are also very cool.
C) If advertisers had a fucking clue, the would learn that the quality of the commercial determines how much it gets watched. Make the commercials funny or interesting like they do in Europe. Our commercials suck incredibly bad. It's amazing these companies make any money off of them. Don't these guys ever wonder why there's people who don't even care about football watching the Superbowl?
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
"Friends" started doing this the season before their last with their "extended" episodes. All I do to compensate is on my dvr I tell it to start a few minutes early and end a few late.
I simply set CSI to have a higher priority and stopped watching the show with the f*cked up timing.
No reason to reward that behavior anyway.
During the off season I pick up the missed show... if I'm really hurting for something to watch.
Most of the time, I'm not.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
I have sent multiple suggestions to Tivo on this very matter. I often run into it around sporting events that run for 3+ hours. For instance, when one of the tennis Grand Slams are on, I won't to record every broadcast minute that isn't being occupied by one of my higher priority programs. That way, when my thirty-minute sitcom comes on, it can stop recording tennis, record the show, and resuming recording tennis without me having to painfully setup manual recording times.
/ds
Tivo could fix it with a simple "Record Partial Programming" option... if they wanted to.
The more troublesome they make recording, the more people will download. Just like with copy protected cds. If i cannot play a cd i bought on my laptop, i may download it from some file sharing network. After i downloaded it, i may ask myself: why the hell did i pay for this??(of course because i _like_ the band)
vajk
I'm not too bent out of shape about it (yet) since they usually air repeats later in the week. But it'd be great if the tivo could detect where I might want to do back to back recording on a network and grab the whole thing as one big block that starts a minute or two early and ends a minute or two late.
Unfortunately Tivo can do nothing for my room mate hogging all the disk space. That, alas, is a hardware problem (Solved with the correct application of a large plumber's wrench... to said room mate...)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Why is it called soft-padding?
It's not actually about padding extra time on the following show to let it start late as much as allowing overlap recording. The length of the show changes because of the lost time..
simple algorithm:
If the tivo is idle, then record next priority show in slot, even if start-time passed, as long as it hasn't ended.
Doesn't soft-padding just slide the recording slot, but still assumes same time length?
I guess you don't watch much TBE.
I will not be escalating my PVR vs. the networks war (I don't watch enough TV) but I could end up renting all the TV I watch a year later ...
Eventually this will end:
You can do this with my cox DVR. Whether it is a one time recording of a show, or a series recording, you can choose in the preferences for THAT show whether to start early and/or end late. You can choose something like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 15 minutes early, and the same for stopping late... except, for the stopping, I think you can go up to two or three hours. You can do this per individual recording, or for the entire series. I usually look and if a ball game is on before my show, or within a couple hours before my show, I'll set my show to record at least a half hour over. A good solution to what I call the "ball game" problem, would be if the recorder (tivo, cable company dvr, whatever) could receive a signal from the network signifying that the show is beginning/ending, rather than starting/stopping on a time.
If you plug in your tivo to a standerd cable tv coaxial cable (which i assume you do, I dont own one) you can play hundreds of channls simultaniously. My house has one coaxial cable running into it and about 5 or 6 tvs connected though splitters
Although... they could probably do a good double-punch by selling single episodes right after the show is aired, and then selling it again a year later in a boxed set with extras. Maybe a third sale even later with a "director's cut" of the show, which includes a bit of collectable memorabilia.
BeyondTV does custom padding by individual show. You can adjust any recording to start/finish x amount of minutes early/late. Great for football games, add an hour just in case it goes long, which happens often. Or for things like ER starting at 9:59, just adjust the other recording to end a minute early. Or just throw in another PVR-250 card so it can start recording the next show while still recording the previous show.
ever tried to catch the weather on the three local
10 o'clock news shows? They usually stagger or align the weather forcast so that you have to pick one and miss the others.
Don't underestimate the power of advertising to mess with TV schedules. The ad industry wants all shows to have commericials at about the same tv to prevent surfing. If you surf and all you see are commericials, then they win. They weren't too pleased with TBS's schedule and I'm pretty sure this had some affect on their change.
rewriting history since 2109
There's a simple solution to this mind-boggling problem. Then, you won't have to worry about a minute here or a minute there. You'll have hours that you'll have to fill up with... [gasp] real life!
I don't respond to AC's.
I can't beleive no one has mentioned MythTV yet. If a show I'm recording ends at 9:01 and another I want to record started at 8:59, Myth will just start recording the second show without any user intervention at all. It just happens automagically. I'm sure I could tweak the conflict priorities a bit to *prevent* the default behavior, so I'd be on par with Tivo though... ;)
Who would WANT to record that much crap? Ignoring storage space considerations, there just isn't that much worth watching on TV.
On-demand TV is more likely to be the eventual solution.
This is not true. If you add padding to the end of one show such that it ends after another begins, then a conflict is created and the second show will not record. The only way around this is to set up a manual record for the second show which defeats the purpose of a PVR. As much as I love ReplayTV (I have 2), it does not have any advantage over Tivo in this area.
The Tools Of Ignorance wanna be a tool?
Well I'll be raising the threat matrix level at my house to red, that's for sure! While they are at it, maybe they can make all my junk mail accidently go to my neighbor's house.
Fine, I'll start getting everything from Netflix or similar services. Then I won't see ANY of the networks' precious commercials EVER.
Television is not an essential utility. I'd rather wander aimlessly around GTA:San Andreas than watch most of what's on TeeVee these days. At least I can shoot the annoying people in GTA, and pimp some hos when murderous rampages grow tiring. Or I could get back into programming shareware.
And these days every series is put on DVD. Even Firefly, which ran for, like, seven and a half seconds on TV can be seen on DVD. I'm close to dropping Showtime and HBO and just waiting for the next seasons of Dead Like Me and Sopranos to get to DVD. I can rent those from Netflix along with most movies, and make my own copies while I'm at it.
I pad everything two minutes on my Tivo anyway, so, no biggie in the end. And I just don't watch enough to encounter overlaps with two tuners.
--- Ban humanity.
Tell him to search for "EndPadPlus". The code is out there now. And I bet that Tivo would be able to get permission to include it. Or at least steal how it works for thier own stuff. That fact that the hackers have done this in TCL shows that it's not all that hard to do. There is no good reason this isn't in the stock software.
It works great on my DTivo. It's even dual-tuner aware!
I sold all of my TiVo stock two weeks ago because of this issue. Overraction? Maybe, but I've owned a TiVo for five years now, and while I still think of it as the best consumer AV purchase I ever made, they just don't seem to understand how to compete against the generic DVRs.
The scheduling info is what people are PAYING them a PREMIUM for! And then they send an email to their customers saying "hey, we know the data is wrong, so you should adjust it manually."
Hello! Anyone home at TiVo!?
They sent me a service notice last year saying that if I have a season pass for "Friends", I should make sure to check it because the finale would be on a different night, or run long, or something. But I don't have a season pass for friends, and THE BOX KNOWS THAT.
It's sad. They created the coolest device ever. And then they seem to have totally forgotten what they were trying to accomplish. They're letting the networks destroy the things that make them better than a random-access VCR.
If chosing a DVR comes down to "Unit A, with a bunch of little problems, or Unit B, with a bunch of different little problems", then people will pick the cheaper box.
TiVo's big advantage is the season pass. The AUTOMATIC SCHEDULING SEASON PASS. They should be focusing on getting scheduling perfect where every other DVR is a stupid VCR with a HD instead of tape.
And finally, one last example of how they're blowing it. If you _do_ adjust your recordings to go, say, 1 minute long, then the next program doesn't record 1 minute short, it doesn't record AT ALL (unless you have a 2nd tuner available).
Sigh.
And the really sad thing is there isn't anything better out there yet.
I got around this by getting a MythTV box and setting it to always record 5 minutes after and 5 minutes before. Sure you can do this with TiVo, but MythTV has one advantage - it can support more than two tuners. This is important because back to back shows will overlap with the extra end and beginning padding. I currently have three Hauppauge PVR-250 tuner boards in mine, and I haven't had any real scheduling conflicts with the scheme yet (although I'm thinking of getting a 4th just in case).
I think state of the art is to have one RF demod and a decoder on one chip. Even if you could jam 10 demod/decoders on a chip, you'll need more than 50 chips drawing God knows how much current. You'd be advised to have the electric company just drop another service line right down to your home theater.
--- Ban humanity.
Step One: Turn on your TV.
Step Two: Holding the power button on your TiVo, unplug it from the wall.
Step Three: Holding the power button on your TV, unplug it from the wall.
Step Four: Stand in front of the television and then look to the side. Imagine your gaze has an infinite range which follows the curvature of Earth. Think about how right now your life, and the lives of 6.5 billion people, are ticking away one second at a time. Imagine that what you do with your temporary gift of consciousness actually matters.
Step Five: Welcome back to reality.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
Is trying to halt the move to PVR before it gains much momentum. Right now we live in a very TV related culture. Like it or not, it's the norm to come home from work and turn on the tv for the rest of the night - despite there not being that much above the 'meh' level of quality. Even one show someone actually 'likes' is enough to get most people watching for hours before and after it airs.
I think what the networks are terrified of is people no longer doing this. One of the most common statements I hear from people with DVRs is that they can't stand to watch live TV anymore. It's certainly something I've found to be true after picking up one of the older model ReplayTv units. I think what the networks should be most affraid of, and what might be one reason for these scheduling problems, is people realising just how much time they waste watching shows they don't even really enjoy.
Everything will be taken away from you.
So I wish TiVo would at least allow any length for manual recordings, if they are not going to allow negative padding. Or at least allow more choices for positive padding.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
You people are fools. The original poster is correct and knows his TiVo better than those claiming to be "elite" TiVo users. If you set a program to habitually record 2 minutes late, than TiVo will not record any program that overlaps with this even if just for 2 minutes. Why it chooses to miss an entire program if it can't catch the first two minutes is beyond me. This seems like a simple tweak and they should add it to the software immediately.
If you start having overlaps, you're watching too much TV.
--- Ban humanity.
I have watched when they played this game with The West Wing and Law & Order. Law & Order really started at 9:00 P.M. (Central), but the start time in the schedule was either 8:59 P.M. or 9:01 P.M.
If they play that game and it interferes with my viewing preference, I might drop the offending program. I weigh the two programs and make a choice. The television networks can play those games, but they are taking a gamble. For my choice, the offending network generally loses out. If a network plays these games on a regular basis, then I might just drop it from my list of viewable channels.
I don't need to watch any programs. I watch them for enjoyment. I will weed out programs from my season passes on a regular basis.
AFAIK in Germany at least, the TV schedules are almost totally non-synchronized ANYWAY. Whenever I'm there it seems that no TV schedules are harmonized to start/stop at common times.
-Styopa
All TiVo has to do is change its programming a bit.
Agreed. But they could even do more than what you propose. I've seen my TiVo resolve conflicts by recording the second show when it is aired on a different station at a different time. I've seen cases where something like the Simpsons would air Sunday night at 8:00 (it's regular time slot) then an affiliate would re-air the same episode 3 or 4 days later around 11:30 or so. So you might have to wait a bit to get the show you want but you'd still get the full episode.
Another thing TiVo could do would be to make their boxes communicate with each other if you have more than one on a home network. I'm hearing of more and more people who have 2+ TiVos at home. If they could talk to each other then one could record the first show and the other record the second one. Let's see Hollywood deal with that!
Well, I guess I'll stop watching their shows if they pull something like that. Would they rather I don't watch it at all? Because that's the kind of antagonistic result they'll get.
How about adapting to the chaning market? The concept is non-linear advertising and it's not a new concept. Perhaps they should look into THAT instead of punishing their viewers?
My guess is the same blow hards running the RIAA are working with the MPAA and other associations looking to twart new markets.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
Not necessarily...with MythTV you can have multiple tuners...so, they can record independantly of each other, so, this overlap is no problem.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
When hardware advances, we will be able to record more than one channel at the same time, rendering this technique useless.
Lets see if Tivo is still around...
--
Wiki de Ciencia Ficcion y Fantasia
for each recording or season pass, you can set it to record up to 5min before and 5min after. please RTFM before proclaiming tivo can't handle it.
And what if next week NBC decides to schedule ER to start 2 minutes early? The shows come into conflict again. If they shift it to start on time, you've cut off the end of CSI for no reason. You're still at the mercy of the networks.
Better would be to allow the software to resolve partial conflicts dynamically, giving shows a designation of "hard" or "soft". Soft shows will yield their conflicted time to hard shows. Two soft shows would split the conflicted time between them. This would maximize the amount of recording that could occur.
Two hard shows in conflict fall back to current behavior of highest priority wins, because sometimes I find I want to use positive padding just to conflict out a particular timeslot.
Or, even if you have only one MPEG encoder in your analog unit, still allow two sources to be hooked up and PIP or split-screen the video between the conflicts for a minute, routing each channel's sound to opposite speakers.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
is dual tuner TiVo's. That way, you could record and/or watch both shows, regardless of the start/stop time BS the networks throw at their customers.
Added bonus: Record one show while watching another with full TiVo capabilities.
If you forget about the future, the future will forget about you.
to create your own TiVo equivalent that could record multiple channels at the same time while happily ignoring broadcast flags?
Here in Australia, we have 3 major commercial networks.
All have been using this tactic for at least 5 years.
The current 'trend' is the unpublicised show overrun. Recently, Australian Idol ran late by well over an hour, and another stupid program known as "Dancing with the Stars" did the same thing for weeks on end.
Occasionally, it does come back to bite the networks, The Seven Network received about half its expected audience for a major miniseries (about Lindy Chamberlain and the 'Dingo's got my baby!') which they themselves blamed upon the overrun of a previous show causing viewers to switch.
This is one area in which i am NOT proud to see Australia leading the way...
Lets just get all the stations to be 10 minutes apart from each other so that no one will be able to record consistantly with Tivo.
While we're at it, lets also stop movies at the theater 10 minutes before the end to start the previews for the next one. But lets leave the advertisements the same length.
Eventually, people will be paying to see the advertisements and ten minutes of a random part of some movie!
Brilliant.
That'll teach those pirates!
Think of the children!
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
How about just downloading everything on the net? You can get any decent show online (ie people watch the crap and filter it out for you) ad-free and at any time you want, with tactics like repeating the same brainless irritating advert with annoying music, breaks every few minutes, and sticking sucky station logos all over the screen and then charging you, and extra for special events and porn, its a wonder why anyone watches it in the first place? Just stop watching and switch your cable subscription to a fast net connection and ignore tv for now. Sure they will go out of business and shows will stop being made, then you can watch a few repeats until they get their act together and start giving customers a better deal.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
This is, of course, a zero-sum game. For every person who quits watching CSI: Springfield because Law and Order: Metermaids runs late, there will be one person who quits watching L&O:M to catch CSI:S. If all networks synced up to the Naval Atomic Clock and started shows at hour-and-15-seconds and ended them at hour:59:45, more shows would get watched overall. A rising tide lifts all boats.
But hey, where does cooperation and common sense belong in corporate America, even if it can be easily proven that it's the best thing to do for all involved?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
When the credits of a show are compressed or scrolled through extra fast it makes it more dificult to read actor's names. I wonder if SAG is going to get on this. I wonder if this breaks any bargaining agreements?
"brxref
my favorite shows will go from 9:04 to 9:32, commercials will run in packets, randomly determined, from 4, 17, 24, 35 and 59.7 seconds.
This is my sig.
In the next few years, network bandwidth will be so high that people will be able to send TV broadcasts over their ordinary internet connections with bog standard equipment either as a stream or as an e-mail attachment.
There will be so much bandwidth available that people's ISPs won't even notice millions of people sending the Superbowl to their work PC halfway around the world.
The media companies will just have to learn to adjust to a world where we get our entertainment the way we want it, when we want it.
As with the ipod and Apple's music store vs. Kazaa, people will pay for a convenient solution that fits our active moder
With the exception of a few PBS broadcasts I don't see anything worth watching on the Dinosaur Networks. I find more than enough programming to fill the week up from History, Discovery, A&E, TechTV, and sometimes spike when they have Most Extream Elimination Challange. Between that and 20 hours of gaming and a full time UNIX gig I dont have time for anything else.
I've owned a two-tuner TiVo for a couple years and yes, this IS a problem. not as much of a problem as if there were only one tuner, but it is, I assure you, a problem. what if I want to use my dual-tuner tivo for what it was DESIGNED FOR (i.e., recording two whole shows taht are on at the same time) *and* I want to record another show immediately before or after? if all 3 have to be started early and end late, there is a conflict.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
My old VCR used to handle this somewhat more gracefully. If I had a weekly program, say from 7:00 to 8:00, and I had another program that recorded from 7:00 to 7:30, it would record the first program (if it had a higer priority) and then switch channels to record the last half of the other program.
Yes, this is the most elegant and TiVo-like way to handle it. TiVo already has a priority system. So in the event of unavoidable conflicts, it should switch to the higher-priority show when it comes on, even if it overlaps a lower-priority show. Similarly, it should switch to a lower-priority show as soon as the higher-priority one ends. Alerts regarding anticipated partial overlap could be placed in the "To Do" screen, giving the user a chance to rearrange show priorities or cancel one of them.
This would also largely obviate the need for "soft" padding, which is needed to handle shows that run later than scheduled (which is a even more annoying than shows scheduled to run long). Currently, I'm reluctant to routinely add padding at the end of shows, because it may create a conflict and cause me to fail to record something else.
Tell me what you will do in 2-3 years when movie houses start interrupting movies to show commercials, when DVDs you rent are interrupted for commercials you can't zap?
You don't have to do anything - I'm sure you can't shrink your world to any arbitrarily small size, declare victory and go home. At point do you say to yourself you've had enough?
Ahh, how unique, the screaming of the ignorant.
All you have to do is change a few environment variables to set custom offset options. That's only been public knowledge for the past 3 major OS revisions...
What I ended up doing is having:
1) a season pass for CSI,
2) then a lower priority repeating manual recording from 9-10 for ER,
3)then a lower prioty season pass for ER in case they decide to run in a different time slot some week
seems to work pretty well.
First of all, your example is flawed. The issue is that NBC is programming ER to start at 9:59pm (ET). When MythTV sees this, it assumes a conflict because CSI starts at 10pm - BEFORE the first program ends. (If you don't understand the difference between the two, then I will stop wasting my keystrokes.) Whichever program has the higher priority will be recorded. The other will be skiped. Second of all, since I don't "beleive" you, can you explain to the rest of the class how you do this in a one-tuner MythTV box? I have such a setup and I have not found one tweak to make this happen, apart from setting up a manual schedule to record CSI from 9pm until 9:59pm, which I would have to do every week.
(Whether or not ER actually begins at 9:59 every week, I'm not certain. I would be surprised if it actually did. I am of the opinion that this is just some hocus pocus on NBC's part to prevent Tivo-ing. Perhaps I should be fitted for a tinfoil helmet...)
It's also apparent that viewer loyalty means very little, especially with the change-over of season shows to the current 'Summer Season' where many series have been run out with multiples in one week and at odd times, over the last few weeks. Of course, for UK or USA sourced shows, we're also getting them out of phase/season with their screening there.
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
all along.
DOn't go after PVRs through legal channels, find a technicall solution.
I already have a good idea of how they will eventually get around auto commercial skipping features. Also how to get more people to want to watch the commercials.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I've got 3 DTiVos. All are set using hacks to auto-pad and yes, there is a way to share scheduling to resolve conflicts. It's simple and still a little buggy but it can be done. PC MediaPortal will probably make it a lot easier to add these types of enhanced capabilities than TWP.
I speculated this last night when Lost was set to run until 9:01...perfect for stopping any 9pm show from being recorded.
So each episode of Buffy costs about 50 cents. Netflix charges at least $1.50 per rental. That's kind of tight, marging-wise, but not absurdly low. Of course, you'd only get 1 episode per DVD, but for first-run television it would have to work that way.
Sound like a cool idea. I also get all my TV from sneakernet.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"As long as they get the viewer in front of the tube so they can get their advertising revenue, that's all that matters."
should actually be:
"As long as they can convince the advertiser that the viewer is in front of the tube so they can get their advertising revenue, that's all that matters."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And they wonder why the viewers to turning away.
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
Yes, you can setup a manual record in the TiVo to do it, but it defeats the purpose. With the TiVo you set the shows you want to record, and then don't worry. The networks rearange the shows, no problem. Now they have this messed up scheduling and we are back to doing things the VCR way.
I have a dual tunner TiVo, so fortunately it doesn't affect me much. My TiVo has also been hacked to add soft padding, but it can only extend a show, not shrink it.
Ted Turner devised the :05 thing back in the early 80s. At the time, they referred to it as "Turner Time". Turner claimed it gave viewers a chance to check the other channels to see what was on, then hit TBS and not miss anything. Dual purpose: once a show ends, you've already missed five minutes of a show on another channel, so you might as well stick with TBS.
It used to be that TV and radio stations had a limited lease on the frequency they used and renewal depended on proving that it is in the *public* interest for them to continue to have that frequency. For TV networks, it seems like the comment period for renewal is now ignored by the FCC and they get automatic renewal. The fact that the FCC is now pushing the broadcast flag with no requirements maximum on how much the flag can be used to prohibit recording is a clear indication that the FCC no longer consider the frequency to be owned by the public and provided by the public on a temp. lease to the networks.
Tivo will not do that for you. A season pass is tied to a specific channel.
If it did happen, you would get the show under "Tivo Suggestions" if it was rated high enough.
But suggestions seems to have gone downhill IMO. It fills up with crap I hate, and doesnt record the shows I like!
I am not so sure that Tivo's clock is so stable. With my Tivo, a DirecTivo series 2, the guide data is at least 30 seconds to a minute off from "real" time. I am constantly seeing the beginning of a show when the Tivo clock reads *:58 or *:59, as well as missing the first minute or so of recordings.
People will continue to change the channel away from a dumb show in favor of something they like even if the first program ends a minute or five beyond the :00 or :30 break, but they still were there during all xx+ minutes of ads (anybody time the ads in Housewives? I'm guessing 18-22 minutes.)
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
This >IS the reason I stopped recording (& following) many a show.
It usually goes something like this:
1) The show runs at standard times.
2) I record and follow it. The End Result? Some advertising gets viewed.
3) Some idiot TV exec comes up with the A#1 idea of changing the time slot somehow in order to get me to play "follow the leader".
4) Since I have better things to do than play a round of "TV Show Wild Goose" I immediately fob it off, and don't follow the show any further. The End Result? The advertising is NOT seen...
5) (optional) Yet another idiot TV Exec believes that since the audience #'s have dropped through such attrition then decides that the show should be cancelled.
6) (optional) The show comes out on DVD.
7) (optional) I resume watching the show without the impediment of Ad's!
My overall opinion of this tactic? Yet another stupid "marketing" stunt that will waste everybodies time, until certain clueless twits figure out that it's a totally worthless tactic to use with consumers.
[Now, I'm off to lift my le... Um, visit... at another place.]
A whole minute!? Oh my gosh, how do you put up with it!?!?
In Australia, especially with evening TV, you can expect the start of shows to be shifted around by a good 15-20 minutes from their scheduled times on some channels from time to time. That is when the scheduled times aren't shifted around from week to week to accommodate the latest sport/reality TV/final episode/crime drama/fad event. I'm already in the habit of setting up my VCR to record 20 minutes before and after the scheduled times, because my old padding of 15 minutes actually wasn't enough on one occasion. And I start recording manually every few weeks because they are screening the show half an hour earlier or later.
I swear, they air the good shows in the evening and screw with the times frequently so they can claim that no-one watches them, thus allowing them to pimp the latest reality TV show where backstabbing football-playing forensic scientists, lawyers and police officers are voted off an island in the final episodes of the series.
Hell, if this keeps up, the networks will be stepping all over each other to get you to view their programs. Pretty soon, it'll be randomized and you will have to guess the time that your show will be on! Advertisers will love this!
It's like "looking busy" at your employment - it's actually easier to do real work than to fake it. - bmo
I believe EyeTV also will interrupt the end of a program to catch the beginning of the next, but I haven't quite figured out which it is yet.
What the hell are you talking about?
You don't have to record the next show.
If your PVR is intelligent enough, and a show begins at 7:59 and/or ends at 9:01 - and it is defined as such in the guide, OR you instruct it to begin X number of minutes before or stop X number of minutes after - it will record just fine. And your second tuner can record any other show on any other channel you wish that "conflicts" with the 1 minute discrepancies.
I know, because *I* do it all the time.
Sure, as some other posters said, you can't record 45 conflicting shows at once, but I'm just talking about two shows here. And if I want to watch another show at the same time, I either watch something that has been prerecorded OR watch directly off my cable connection (i.e., not through the PVR). This works just fine.
I have no idea where you get the idea that you need to record the next show. But since you said "what am I suppose (sic) to do" instead of "what am I supposed to do", I guess that answered my question.
Actually, the real reason this is happening has to do primarily with maximizing advertising dollars, and maybe secondarily to keep people from changing the channel. This tactic trips up DVRs mostly since they are robots who make the general assumption that programs will start and stop at normal times. A friend of mine at ABC put it like this: Desperate Housewives is a very popular show and can command higher ad revenues that Boston Legal, the show that follows it. So if DH is extended one additional minute into the next time slot, that's one additional minute of ad revenue that ABC can sell for a popular show, versus a lesser popular show. You do this enough, and this ads up to real money over an entire season.
Just stop watching TV.
The content is getting worse (when you thought it couldn't)
The advertising is getting worse (when you thought it couldn't)
The inconvenience is getting worse (when you thought it couldn't)
The LEGAL SYSTEM is getting worse (when you thought it couldn't)
There is no reason to involve yourself in any non-authoritarian activitity unless it is on terms you agree with.
I don't buy popular music in any format. I do not go to first run movie theaters (I will not pay more than $2/person to see a movie). I do not go to blockbuster to rent DVDs (there's a DVD rental store down the street thats $1/day for a new release, or $1/wk for an old one). I do not have any kind of TV service, and I don't even have an antenna.
The RIAA, MPAA, Hollywood, TV executives, the advertising universe... they're out to take a crap in your mouth because you don't have the willpower to say "sthwaap" ("stop", spoken with a crap filled mouth impeding proper diction)
So, eliminate them from your life.
Now, everytime i read something on slashdot about how some new law is going to drill holes in your eyelids so you cant even blink during commercials, i laugh, because i said goodbye to all of that BS.
The Network broadcast tv experience, by and large, is so awful that given the choice between watching a TV broadcast and sitting alone, doing absolutely nothing, id rather sit alone, doing absolutely nothing. At least I could probably fall asleep to pass the time.
Get familiar with your public library. It's still free, and books aren't filled with advertisements.
Yet.
(infact, you might want to pick up a few classics to start memorizing them. Ray Bradbury may be come to known as a fantastic non-fiction author)
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Doesn't that prevent you from watching both shows with a normal TV, too?
No show is worth being controlled by the media brain slugs.
If the networks placed the whole tv shows including the adds (yes regional issues determin adds, but you can preencode several version for each country/major region) on the servers in WMV format without ability to FF/RW, or if WMV allows, only FF/RW in the show but not the adds. Make them free, it would be like a another free distribution, (as it costs money to broadcast on tv signals, an approved torrent release is the same, but wider)
Or hell, if I ran a tv station, id make every tv show available on DVD by mail order with in 24hrs on the website for some ultra cheap price, like $4 or something, but with the adds as well that can't be FF/RW.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Thats the problem, managers that are so dumb, they cant understand the flowchart logic so they dont approve it, or that they didnt think of it for themselves so they dont approve the engineers doing it, or at best, they approve it, but only for the next version on the next 'expensive' model only so force 'increased sales' of the new units.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
This sort of thing has been happening in Oz for as long as I've been recording TV shows... The networks here *always* manage to have non prime-time shows start and finish late.. often by up to 20 minutes.
Even the prime-time shows often run overtime.
It's really quite frustrating to have to set the "finish recording 20 minutes late" on my MythTV box.
I've always envied the ability that US viewers (previously) have of being able to say "record from 8:30 - 9:30 and get the whole show.
Anything is possible, except skiing through revolving doors.
I don't have a TIVO so I don't know what's up... but can't you just program your TIVO to record at 9:02 instead of 9:00? What are you going to miss in the first two minutes anyway... probably just commercials.
Meh.
I do this with the HBO/Showtime channels that have east coast and west coast feeds, as well as "2" (eg, HBO2, HBO2 Pacific, etc) versions. I get season passes on each of them, put the show at a low priority, and the TiVo will only record one of each episode.
Works pretty well, except for the cumbersome process of adding each channel.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Well, to be fair CBS does the same trick in a different manner.
:)
Instead of -announcing- the differing schedule, CBS simply starts CSI 1 minute early (and therefore Survivor ends 1 minute earlier than announced).
In the case of a show like CSI, CBS is shooting themselves in the foot by not at least making their start time accurate, as often missing the first minute of that show can leave one confused for the remaining 59 minutes
Our solution is simple, we watch Survivor anyway, but yeesh.
As for ER a minute early, that is why my wife and I agreed to kill the season pass for it since we like CSI better.
And yes, TiVo can work to bandage the situation and probably are, but the fault of this lies with the networks. Manual recording times can help but are a pain in the butt. 9:00 means 9:00, not 8:59 in spirit or in the guide. And the networks, not TiVo, are responsible for feeding the data to the guide services.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
I set up my MythTV so different shows / channels have higher or lower priority. Granted I may loose a little of a show, but the one I want more doesn't get cut off.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
TBS Superstation has all programming beginning :05 after the hour, which I never understood.
My impression was that they had done it for separate listings - in TV Week
Perhaps that was part of it. But it also gives major lockin.
If you're bored and tuning around, you hit TBS just about when the next movie starts, making you more likely to stay than if it was already in progress.
If you stay until it ends then switch, you've missed the first five minutes of the show you switched to - just enough to be seriously annoying. But staying on TBS puts you at the start of the next movie.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Make the commercials funny or interesting like they do in Europe.
And get them laughed off the air by the FCC.
Don't these guys ever wonder why there's people who don't even care about football watching the Superbowl?
They came to see the wardrobe malfunction.
My wife missed the ending of the last Friends episode, the ending of the Bachelor, the ending of the Apprentice. The only way she got to see the entirety of the show was after I bittorrented them -- which makes me wonder why in the world I'm paying for ReplayTV?
Linux at home
Here in Australia your lucky if any of the channels prime time programs finish or start within 10 minutes of the advertised time. The number of channels that run special events and end of season finales that run over time by up to 10-15 minutes is amazing. Forget Tivo (not that we have it in Australia) its hard enough to set a VCR to record a problem unless your sitting there watching it as well...
Has anyone noticed the trend of some listings in the program guide being wrong. Where the the guide has either last week's or next week's description in it? I thought it was just an error at first, but it seems to happen so often that I suspect it's intentional. ---Why? well anyone using a MythTV or other DVR/PVR will either record a re-run, or it won't record it thinking it's a repeat.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
Put the DVD in about 10 minutes before you want to start watching the movie. This gives it time to run through all the unskippable ads, and finally get to the menu. By the time you arrive, it's patiently waiting at the Main Menu, and you select play.
A few DVDs autolaunch into the movie, which is annoying. But, you can just back up or return to the main menu and restart the movie from there.
This is why you need to use a Cable DVR instead of TiVO.
I have been using a DVR (now a HD-DVR dual tuner) for quite a while, and I have no problems with this, and I do record shows that begin at 1 minute past the hour.
consider that I live in a small city (pop. 25,000+) in a midwestern state
How can one find a job that pays more than minimum wage in such a small town?
There have been several threads already that have talked about this very simple idea... Fully Interactive TV. Satellites and Cable and "DSL" can all handle the bandwidth (or soon will be) and it would allow for the user to customize their "viewing experience". I imagine something along the lines of "watch wne you want", and the shows are "streaming media" and can also be downloaded as . That way, the networks/providers put TiVo and other DVR/PVR companies "out of business", as you can go back to weeks previous and download or stream the entire show at your desire. You would still get the commercials, but you would be able to "skip" them... The unfortunate thing is, it would be harder to limit the number of "ads" that the providers want to foist upon you on your interactive screen...
--E--
I have noticed this for about a year and a half now. Most notably on Thursday nights with NBC programming.
ER starts at 8:59, which prevents me from recording CSI on CBS which runs from 8:00 to 9:00.
Could you be any lazier? Just manually program CSI to end at 8:59.
Lordy, TiVo gives you the power to manually program by time and channel. Use it, people!
What would you rather pay for? A channel line up with commercials that you've already paid for with your monthly fees, or a database of shows you can watch anytime you want. Why flip channels when you can have a menu of instance choices? I see programing going to view-on-demand entirely in the next 10 years. It's only natural given our impatience and the increasing capacity of all forms of data transfer.
if you go to the to do list you can make a recording start or end at a tweaked time.... i have only added (to compensate for this) and it lets you add 1 minute, 2, 5 then i guess it goes up by 5?
the big stinker is if you need to record till 21:01 and a show on a network that uses standard timing starts another show you want to record at 21:00. fortunately i don't TiVo much so that has not been an issue yet.
for the record i use a series 1 TiVo with.... whatever the newest software is... or close to it.
Humanity survived for thousands of years w/o pennicillin too. Do we really really want to take our ball and go home?
http://www.teenreads.com/reviews/0763617261.asp
Not a bad show. It has been replayed on a cable channel, maybe even court TV. It made for a good listen while I was re-doing the bathroom one summer. Stripping wallpaper can be so boring.
For the record, the 2nd season really stunk. But the conclusion episodes were (those post-verdict) were quite good. Too bad you missed them.
when you record the later broadcast, you dont get the whole episode, they cut stuff to put in more commercials
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
Um, I would just like to point out, for all those who didn't read the entire article, that all the shows mentioned SUCK MAJOR BALLS! Who cares if you miss the final minute of ER...you've probably already seen in 1,000,587 times anyways.
Soft padding is but one of a long laundry list of features that Tivo has failed to add -- batch play/save to VCR is my personal missing favorite. Instead we have photo showing, MP3 playback, and multi-room, which are features that are either not core to the mission of Tivo (television recording and playback) and/or are code-intensive and relevent to the very few people who own multiple Tivos.
In order for Tivo to survive the onslaught of cable and satellite provider based DVRs (not to mention Myth and Replay), Tivo needs to stay ahead of everyone else on features core to watching TV, and not invest a bunch of effort in side projects like photo viewing and MP3 playing. Tivo is better, but for $5 per month for most Time-Warner SA8000s, Tivo isn't really $600 up front better (Tivo+lifetime).
Check out this list for a ton of things that would make Tivo much better, and much of it would be trivial to implement. Some of it is (as the list's author suggests) be more complicated than Joe Sixpack could deal with, but a lot of it wouldn't even be noticable as a "new" feature.
I then wrote a polite but firmly worded letter to NBC telling them that while I was only one person, I was cancelling my tivo season pass for ER and would not be a viewer again until they dispensed with the cuteness. I don't suppose that will have had any effect -- I am only one viewer, but if people would voice their annoyance.... maybe it would help.
As an aside, yes it is easy to work around this... and easy enough to put in manual overrides to get what you want to watch, but the entire point (okay one of the big points) of tivo is its ability to handle everything for you. If I wanted to enter times and channels and babysit the schedule, I'd have just gotten a $90 vcr. Go figure.
(OTOH: I suppose there really is the possibility the writing skills and scheduling are so finely honed at NBC they really do need to schedule down to the minute.... :-) (sorry about the smiley)... :-( (and the frowny))
Aren't there any TiVo employees out there who could give us a hint why simple usability features like this are never implemented? Anonymously would be fine. _ TiVo did a great job with their software to begin with but, speaking as a customer, the pace of improvement is frustrating.
So how does one make these simple changes without opening the box, which I guarantee most people do not do? Also the latest units require resoldering a new boot PROM onto the motherboard to hack.
Are you beta testing the new version 5 of the software or something? I don't see any option to do this in my menus. It would be cool if TiVo is finally adding improvements like soft padding and cooperative scheduling, especially for DirecTiVos.
Thay have been back to back for some time now
There're too many comments here to scan to know if someone's already suggested this, but:
Tivo can easily fix this by an easy change to their software. When you pick a program to record, you just pick an option that basically says "start recording this show whenever you can." That way, even if a show goes a minute long, you're not going to miss the other show -- except maybe a minute. And I'd rather miss a minute than the whole show.
Now, if a network is consistently 1 minute long with a show, you can simply record by time/date rather than by show name, and start recording a minute later.
But I'd rather have Tivo give us the option to record a show whenever it finishes recording the previous show.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
So, let me see if I get this straight. The networks are going to stab each other in order to keep me roped in. They're going to end and begin shows so that, not only can I not manually change the channel at the right time, but not even my TiVo can keep up?
Gee, it's really too bad you can't download TV shows from the Internet from a legal provider that either charges per show or keeps commercials. It seems like I can either choose not to watch shows, choose to miss introductions and / or resolutions, or violate copyright and enjoy every show as it was written and performed in their entirety (after editing anyway).
I've got a friend who has 2 TiVos and a PVR from his cable company because the networks play this game. I do not consider that an option. Managing which one has which subscription is quite a chore. I'd much rather launch an AVI from a single directory.
Sorry man, I wish all credits were gone. Just have them put up a URL and be done with it. Those who want to know can go to the URL.
Me, I don't need to see who provided the food "craft services" for a movie.
Read the parent post again. My example describes soft-padding. MythTV can do that (start recording a scheduled show late as long as it hasn't ended) with one tuner. Your example is a true conflict; I would expect that your box would start recording ER and then either switch to recording CSI 10 if it were a higher priority, or just skip it otherwise.
Ok, seriously, are you just trolling here? Or are you really trying to equate a loss of a life-saving antibiotic with the "life and death" prospect of missing the next episode of 'Survivor'?
I would not expect that a whole bunch of slashdotters watched wrestling regularly, but when I was younger, I did. Back then, Ted Turner's WCW and the WWF (now WWE) were in a ratings war. WWF started having a five minute spillover on their Monday night show, just to have that extra five minutes in which WCW was not airing. I can't remember if WCW returned the favor. Just my two cents.
My other computer is a Jacquard loom.
Yeah, I noticed this too. QUITE often stuff is shifted 5 minuites. Alway so you miss the end.
I just cant wait for the day when they implement a PBS style of advertising where all the commercials are at the top of the hour. They have talked quite seriously about this, and it would buffer us from such underhanded tactics.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
Kind of how a CD costing $15 comes out with that popular new song by Mary MazPrudoozed and eleven other songs that are garbage.
My other computer is a Jacquard loom.
So I am stuck with a 58 minute recording of CSI, a minute off, and then a 61 minute recording of ER
Why not just record both as 60-minute programs? The first minute of ER is usually the "previously on ER" crap anyway... You have to manually set up ER, but you can at least leave CSI on autopilot.
you're the customers of the advertisers' customers. advertising companies sell advertisements, not products. Although, I'm sure by now some of them may be divisions of larger companies who do produce products...
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
For simple items such as the start early/end late options you can just use left/right to increment them.
This is differnet to the start early/end late feature in TiVo for the past 4 years or so... how, exactly?
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Remember Sony some time ago demonstrated a multituner PVR in Japan that has FOUR tuners? I think what will happen very soon is that you may see such devices sold in the USA so the whole issue of overlapping programs will be eliminated. Indeed, such a device will allow you to record programs in competing timeslots simultaneously (e.g., two programs that start at the same time).
The main problem with this is that it is possible to gain a small advantage by cheating, although there is a higher cost to the system as a whole. Then everyone cheats, and you have... well, what you have now.
It might be possible to demand transparency in scheduling, that we be informed our show will run two minutes over. Also synchronized clocks would be very nice. But look how nicely truth-in-advertising laws have worked... at making marketing lawyers dance around them. I fear you'd have much the same problem here.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Let's face it, the whole problem disapears if there is an option where the start-time of a later program interrupts an earlier one.
I have run into this on several (older) PVR products/projects like the ATI PVR for the Radeon/Radeon Pro All-In-Wonder and media center. It would "miss" a later program because it couldn't switch over to it while it was cleaning up an earlier one. So an hour at 9 couldn't be recorded if you just recorded an hour at 8.
It's not that hard to see that you have to switch, wind up what you've got going, and then start the new thing and just be as fast as possible to minimize loss.
If I chose a show that runs from 8:00 to 9:02 and another that runs from 9:00 to 10:02 then It shoudl be "unacceptable" for the second one to just get dropped. Either the recording shoudl start two minutes late, or the first show should be cut off by two minutes (as my choice).
Rocket Science!
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Answer to your first comment: Buy another TiVo. This whole string of whininess is getting out of hand.
Answer to your second comment: No, you are incorrect. The only reason someone would NEED to make a hardware mod is they are using very outdated hacking methods or they're trying to steal service by removing some of the access card security.
No, I'm not running OS 5. I'm running a variant of OS 3 because all that HMO stuff looks like a great way to bog down the devices and make them choke during recording.
t =31854
h p?threadid=144391
Google Sanderton's TWP hacks and you should find his replies about where to patch to change the onscreen offset options. It's been months since I looked into it.
I've always found it's far easier/safer to just get another DTiVo and set hard padding for my season passes while running EndPadPlus: http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?
This one is also incredibly helpful except it doesn't support deleting season passes: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.p
Tivo DOES do this, your just a dumbass who needs to RTFM. When you set up a season pass for a show you can set it to start recording X minutes before and/or after the schows scheduled time.
One. Sometimes Next Scene works but Fast Forward doesn't, or the other way around. Try both.
Two. Sometimes Stop is a sort of soft stop, and following it with Menu goes to the menu as if you had seen all the mandatory stuff. You have to hit Stop twice in a row to really stop.
Three. Load the DVD, leave the TV and stereo off or doing something else, and go about your business. Come back in half an hour or so, make sure the DVD shows MENU, and watch then.
Four. Don't hit Play, instead choose Scene Select and start with scene 1. Some DVDs make even this crawl thru the mandatory stuff, but not many, yet. If it becomes more common, or you are truly thorough, start with scene 2 and skip backwards one scene.
Infuriate left and right
What? They don't want people watching their shows at all??? This basically leaves the viewer have to decide between one show or the other where they could have watched both before. Ah well, it's their funeral. I am completely fascinated by boneheaded business. And don't give me this crap about free tv supported by advertising. Next they'll try to outlaw refridgerators and toilets because they keep people from watching commercials. IDIOTS!
The most popular news program starts at 9:54. 3 minute before the other channels dramas finish. And 10 million people switch at 9:54!! Something must be working there.
I chose to express my opinion by downgrading my premium cable subscription ($50+ for that crap?) and adding the BlockBuster $25 you-can-swap-2-dvds-anytime deal.
I run the show. I refuse to have 25% of my screen taken up by commersials for the next show, the show tomorrow, news at 10:03.
Now I don't have to look at the crappy MPEG encoding Adelphia offers. I will have to make do with DVD quality. And IF they are lucky I MIGHT just see their newscast when I am ready.
Now I just have to get rid of these ridiculous previews of movies sson to come - 3 years ago. Time to make a Myth......
(in case 14 other people didn't beat me to it)
In communist America, TV show shoots you!
he won't watch the shows. He's already SAID he doesn't have to watch them.
So after 10,000,000 people have been refused, there are no customers watching the TV and nobody looking at the ads.
TV exec: Do you want fries with that?
Are you guys talking about the new silver "540-" boxes? I saw a thread on dealdatabase that said that older OSes with known vulnerabilities don't work with the new hardware and that the boot PROM has been fixed to close the other known holes.
Did you try setting myth to record one fewer minutes when it records CSI? I know you can make it end late for a particular show... but I think you can also make it end early? I'll check when I get home.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
You can also start late and end early.
Though a setting for "Start show up to X minutes late" would be nice.
Why not change that? Write some code that says, if the middle of the screen is filled with X-color text that seems to be scrolling (where X is usually white, but can be changed as needed), then place that show on a low-priority setting.
My Tivo will record CSI from 8-9. It will record ER from 9-10. No conflict. Who cares if I miss the first minute of ER.
Series 1 Tivo used.
As far the first minute of ER, ER seems to have less of the "previously on .." stuff than some shows. I would guess only 20 seconds typically, and in the next 40 seconds or so there is often something crucial to the plot.
CSI, on the other hand, never has anything important in its last minute. Its that second to last minute that I am missing right now that's the problem.
Plus I like ER better than CSI.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck