Tivo troubles
 

Had TiVo now for a while, my parents can't get on with it! I've got a tech coming on Wednesday as have signal issues with On Demand. Would I be charged if he took out the TiVo and put a V+ back in?

Re: Tivo troubles
 

They won't charge you. But they won't do it either. V+ is discontinued except for swap outs.

Re: Tivo troubles
 

Although if the engineer has some old stock in his van you might, MIGHT, get a V+ box installed again. I was told that the V+ was out of stock, but when he came to install TiVo he put a V+ box in the second room as he had one in the van.

Re: Tivo troubles
 

I'm in contact with someone at head office who has authorised my account to have a V+ added instead of a TiVo. Also, will it affect my contract?

Re: Tivo troubles
 

Oh good effort! In that case I guess you'll need to ask your contact.

Re: Tivo troubles
 

Ill give him a call and ask tomorrow. V+ was so much user friendly. TiVo is awful at recording In my opinion, programmes getting clipped etc. the only thing which is good is the hard drive space. I don't use suggestions or any other features. Also it looks a bit nicer than the v+ menus.

Re: Tivo troubles
 

You can turn clipping off though.

Re: Tivo troubles
 

This is another classic case of if the TiVo box is set-up correctly, it can be an excellent piece of technology.

Re: Tivo troubles
 

I've had it for over a year now. None of the features are much use to me accept the hard drive space. I've turned clipping on and off, still messes up. For example last night I had this -

19:58 - 21:03 BBC1 recording
19:58 - 21:03 ITV1 recording
20:58 - 22:03 BBC2 recording

the v + would have just clipped automatically and all 3 recorded without trouble. On TiVo I get a message when the 3rd programme is starting to record saying that I have to change to one of the channels for it to record. Very annoying, also if clipping is on, it clips the start of the 3rd recording, not the end.

Re: Tivo troubles
 

Just having a little trouble understanding your example, every program you show would have recorded in full on TiVo regardless of whether overlap protection is on or off. However on the V+ it would have to clip two of your programs as it drops the padding from the end of one and the start of the third recording.

Your example makes it a no brainer, 3 full recordings on TiVo or 1 full and 2 clipped recordings on V+!

Re: Tivo troubles
 

I think the issue is that TiVo doesn't dedicate a tuner to live TV meaning that in the example given all the tuners were in use whereas v+ would have allowed you to carry on without asking to change channels. Of course, as you rightly point out, the benefit is that TiVo actually does the job its supposed to do ie. deliver three full recordings, whereas v+ would have clipped two of them.

Re: Tivo troubles
 

V+ automatically droped padding if a recording channel change was required so you didn"t get the situation that you get with tivo, where a tuner is sometimes taken up just because of padding.

In practice i found with V+, that the although it droped padding, because only a small percentage of shows actually need padding, combined with the fact that only a percentage tuner/recording/channel allocations needed padding to be droped, everything worked really well with my default 5 min before and 10 min after default padding.

Because of the way Tivo handles padding, my defaults are zero and I add a little padding to only a very few specific shows. And again, it works really well. But I prefer the V+ method and think that padding is one area where V+ is better than Tivo.

Re: Tivo troubles
 

I don't often have three things recording but I don't usually see that message when I do.

I have a theory that you will only see that message if you have watched #live tv' on that third tuner within the last... I don't know... 30 mins or so. So it's really just a 'safety' feature.

That said, I have three things set to record tonight at 9pm so I'll let you know what happens. (And I'll try to to go to 'live tv' within the preceding hour.)

Re: Tivo troubles
 

YES! YES! YES! Welcome back Carl, nice to see you back here.

Re: Tivo troubles
 

Your theory is correct. If there has been any activity on a tuner recently, it assumes you are using it. I think the timeout is an hour.