# TiVo putting stuff str8 onto amber!



## Dazbear (Aug 24, 2001)

Hi there

I have been having a problem of late with TiVo deleting stuff within hours of it being recorded.

After 4 years we thought the system had perhaps become overloaded with season passes and stuff to record , so we had a clear out. We deleted everything in the "Now Showing", reduced our Season Passes from 240 to 70, yet stuff still goes str8 onto amber.

I have checked the "To Do" list to see if there is loads over the next day or so; while there are items pending there isnt enough to cause this.

Unless we store to green, stuff is deleted after 24 hours, despite an empty "Now Showing" list and little in the "To Do" 

Any help?

Thanks

D


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Firstly, what size drive do you have, and what quality do you record on?

However, regardless of capacity, I think you may have got yourself into a bit of a vicious circle here:-


Dazbear said:


> Unless we store to green, stuff is deleted after 24 hours, despite an empty "Now Showing" list and little in the "To Do"


Although, as you are clearly aware, setting a program to "keep until I delete" (KUID) will stop it from being deleted, this also reduces the amount of capacity available to the TiVo *for ever* as far as it is concerned. It has no idea when (or if) you are going to delete the show, so it removes that capacity from its available pool for all time. This means that a) other programmes will be marked for deletion earlier in an attempt to keep _some_ space free - which is what you're seeing - and, b) you will possibly get less stuff recorded as it thinks it won't have space for it.

Do you have a number of Season Passes and/or wishlists that you have also set to automatically mark the recordings as KUID? This will only compound the problem as the TiVo will look ahead and see that it *has* to make space for a programme being recorded tomorrow that will never be freed - so again it will make more effort to delete other programmes early now to make room for it.

Do you get a lot of warnings saying "xxx programme will be deleted earlier than planned" when you change the status of recordings in the NPL to KUID? This would be a clear indication that the TiVo thinks it has virtually no space left (either now, or at some point in the future).

My suggestions would be to a) review all of your SPs and change the Save Until date to something other than KUID if possible and, b) don't mark everything as KUID as soon as it gets recorded.

Of course, suggestion c) would be to get a bigger drive


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## Dazbear (Aug 24, 2001)

Thanks for your reply.

Hmmm - we did set some Series Passes to KUID when we went on vacation recently, so they didnt delete before we got home. Sounds like a link!

I have started looking around for an alternative to TiVo. I now feel I am paying £10 a month for what other PVRs get free via the aerial (ie the EPG). 

On the other hand I love the functionality and after having it for 4 years, he is part of the family! hehe


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Dazbear said:


> I am paying £10 a month for what other PVRs get free via the aerial (ie the EPG).


Unfortunately, none of the other so-called PVRs have anything like the richness of detail in the OTA EPG that TiVo provides via Tribune.

AFAIK, you don't get actors, directors, writers, producers, genres etc. etc. - let alone the unique series ID that is required for a persistent Season Pass.

Why not treat yourself (and your TiVo) to a Lifetime sub this Xmas? :up: You could even add a new hard drive into the bargain...


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

blindlemon said:


> Do you get a lot of warnings saying "xxx programme will be deleted earlier than planned" when you change the status of recordings in the NPL to KUID? This would be a clear indication that the TiVo thinks it has virtually no space left (either now, or at some point in the future).


I used to regularly get all these horrible warning messages about programs being deleted early and not having enough disk space until a year and a half ago when I upgraded my Tivo to 2 x 250Gb hard drives giving me 613 hours of recording at Basic. Since then I have never had one of these horrible warning messages.

Your Tivo can be hugely upgraded to seem like a new machine and its also possible to fit a card in it that will let you control recordings from your PC web browser or even remotely from your office or at a web cafe if you are away on holiday. All alternative systems to Tivo are still rubbish because Tivo has patented all of the best features that its recorders use.

You may find the websites www.tivoheaven.co.uk and www.tivoland.com of interest if you think upgrading your current Tivo might be an alternative viable option. Its obviously a shame that like quite a few people you didn't seem to see the obvious mathematical logic in paying £200 for a Lifetime Sub when it took only 20 months for that to pay for itself.


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## Raisltin Majere (Mar 13, 2004)

Pete77 said:


> Its obviously a shame that like quite a few people you didn't seem to see the obvious mathematical logic in paying £200 for a Lifetime Sub when it took only 20 months for that to pay for itself.


Wow. I can't speak for the OP but I certainly am not, and have not been, in a position to shell out £200 for a lifetime sub. That's not a question of mathematical ability. That's a question of finances.

And have you stopped to think that if everybody had your Vulcan-like flair for logic, TiVo would, more than likely, recieve no revenue at all from the UK and have even less reason to provide any kind of service to us?


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Raisltin Majere said:


> Wow. I can't speak for the OP but I certainly am not, and have not been, in a position to shell out £200 for a lifetime sub. That's not a question of mathematical ability. That's a question of finances.


The original selling price of a Tivo was £400 so not exactly a purchase for the impoverished at that time. Having said that the total £600 cost including a Lifetime Sub (which I always regarded as indivisible from buying a Tivo) was one of the main reasons I didn't take a chance on buying one when I saw it at Currys in late 2000 and there seemed so little information as to whether it controlled an OnDigital box and given that all the marketing push was about it working with a Sky box. But when I finally bought a Tivo as an ex demo unit from Currys for £129 2 years later I took the monthly sub for just one month, immediately decided I would always love Tivo and decided that Tivo would also not can the service they had just been selling Lifetime subs on in the next 20 months.

You say you couldn't afford it but how much a month do you spend on alcohol or cigarettes or CD or DVD purchases or going out to expensive meals with your friends. Skipping one or two of those would easily come up with £200. When you think of what many people on here pay to Sky each year of £500 or more in annual subs (not that I'm one of them I hasten to add having only a Freesat Sky box) then a one off £200 was really a rather good investment. Unfortunately I think many people only think as far as what's it going to cost them this month for something without looking at what all those months add up to. Many people seem to sign mobile phone contracts at £30 per month without apparently realising or caring that its a whopping £360 a year every year. I don't suppose you have one of those mobile phone plans by any chance? 



> And have you stopped to think that if everybody had your Vulcan-like flair for logic, TiVo would, more than likely, recieve no revenue at all from the UK and have even less reason to provide any kind of service to us?


Yes I have thought about it and realised that is the case which is why I am happy for them to go on paying the subs from that point of view but on the other hand you can see how going on paying that £120 a year is now really hurting people and making them wonder if they want to go on using Tivo at all. The people most keen to go on using Tivo are the Lifetime Subbers but if it weren't for the monthly guys then Tivo might eventually can the whole Tivo service. A classic case of Catch 22 I fear.

I don't wish to sound arrogant about cheerfully shelling out £200 for a Lifetime Sub but even people who were very low on monthly earnings would actually have been better off putting it on an overdraft or loan over a year and paying the interest than going on paying £10 per month forever.................................

And of course I realise now that I should have bought a Tivo on Day One in 2000 with a Lifetime Sub as practically all the extra cost in buying one would have been offset by the extra £270 or so in Lifetime Sub value I would have had if had bought my Tivo right at the outset.


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Pete77 said:


> [...]better off putting it on an overdraft or loan over a year and paying the interest than going on paying £10 per month forever......


..or add it to your mortgage - £200 will cost you a whopping £11.98 per year @ 5.99% (interest only) and the increase in the value of your house will cancel it out many times over anyway


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## Raisltin Majere (Mar 13, 2004)

Pete77 said:


> The original selling price of a Tivo was £400 so not exactly a purchase for the impoverished at that time. Having said that the total £600 cost including a Lifetime Sub (which I always regarded as indivisible from buying a Tivo) was one of the main reasons I didn't take a chance on buying one when I saw it at Currys in late 2000 and there seemed so little information as to whether it controlled an OnDigital box and given that all the marketing push was about it working with a Sky box. But when I finally bought a Tivo as an ex demo unit from Currys for £129 2 years later I took the monthly sub for just one month, immediately decided I would always love Tivo and decided that Tivo would also not can the service they had just been selling Lifetime subs on in the next 20 months.


Yeah, I understand what you mean. But I had to save for a *long* time to afford my tivo (from ebay), getting a lifetime sub as well would have meant saving even longer, I couldn't wait once I had enough money for the unit itself.



Pete77 said:


> You say you couldn't afford it but how much a month do you spend on alcohol or cigarettes or CD or DVD purchases or going out to expensive meals with your friends. Skipping one or two of those would easily come up with £200.


Okay, I smoke and drink the other three don't apply. I *never* go out to drink, a couple of cans of beer on a Saturday night maybe, I don't smoke much. So yeah, I probably could quit both of those and put the money toward a lifetime sub. But, excuse the "here and now" mind set, at the moment I can have all three and I'm not *that* confident that tivo service will remain in this country for a further 30+ months.



Pete77 said:


> When you think of what many people on here pay to Sky each year of £500 or more in annual subs (not that I'm one of them I hasten to add having only a Freesat Sky box) then a one off £200 was really a rather good investment. Unfortunately I think many people only think as far as what's it going to cost them this month for something without looking at what all those months add up to.


Guilty again. But there's no point in having a tivo if it can't record the programs I like  


Pete77 said:


> Many people seem to sign mobile phone contracts at £30 per month without apparently realising or caring that its a whopping £360 a year every year. I don't suppose you have one of those mobile phone plans by any chance?


Absolutely not. Even if I did, and it worked out to be cost effective when compared to a PAYG one, where's the benefit of saving the money when I could have both that and tivo? Yeah, I get the long-term cost thing.



Pete77 said:


> you can see how going on paying that £120 a year is now really hurting people and making them wonder if they want to go on using Tivo at all. The people most keen to go on using Tivo are the Lifetime Subbers but if it weren't for the monthly guys then Tivo might eventually can the whole Tivo service. A classic case of Catch 22 I fear.


Couldn't disagree more. I guarantee tivo inc will walk out on me before I walk out on them.



Pete77 said:


> I don't wish to sound arrogant about cheerfully shelling out £200 for a Lifetime Sub


You didn't sound arrogant about that. You sounded arrogant about your self-perceived higher intellect.


Pete77 said:


> but even people who were very low on monthly earnings would actually have been better off putting it on an overdraft or loan over a year and paying the interest than going on paying £10 per month forever.................................


I can't fault your logic, and I'm not trying to, but there are a million and one reasons that people may not want an overdraft or loan (or wouldn't be allowed one). It's probably not particularly sensitive to label every monthly subber as unable to see "obvious mathematical logic"



blindlemon said:


> ..or add it to your mortgage - £200 will cost you a whopping £11.98 per year @ 5.99% (interest only) and the increase in the value of your house will cancel it out many times over anyway


The assumption there is that every body has a mortgage...


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

I was waiting for somebody to point that out 

Well, if you haven't got one then you're probably better off than those of us that have and wish we didn't :up:

(now waits for the "I can't afford a mortgage" reply.....)


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## Raisltin Majere (Mar 13, 2004)

blindlemon said:


> I was waiting for somebody to point that out
> 
> Well, if you haven't got one then you're probably better off than those of us that have and wish we didn't :up:
> 
> (now waits for the "I can't afford a mortgage" reply.....)


  The sad thing is, I could probably afford the repayments on a not-big mortgage (I've paid some pretty obscene rents in the past) but the banks don't look at ability to pay they look at annual income, they're not necessarily the same thing.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Raisltin Majere said:


> The sad thing is, I could probably afford the repayments on a not-big mortgage (I've paid some pretty obscene rents in the past) but the banks don't look at ability to pay they look at annual income, they're not necessarily the same thing.


Yes I also have that problem as I haven't been working in a regular job for quite a while now but still have quite a lot of savings and dividend income from shares in my old company that I worked at.

The thing is that all the credit limits I have on credit cards from the time when I had a big income still stand and are not reviewed and of course my current mortgage lender doesn't ask me to repay the mortgage as long as I can meet the monthly payments. But try moving the same value of mortgage to another mortgage lender and the answer is no way at all. You must be in regular full time monthly employment and have 3 pay slips at that salary even though they have no guarantee at all that you won't leave that job tomorrow...............


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Well, at the risk of taking this thread so far off topic that it disappears in a puff of smoke p), it is possible to get a self-cert mortgage with no proof of income required. Alternatively, some banks (eg. Abbey) now offer up to 5x salary on certain mortgage deals.

However, whether anybody should voluntarily clip on the leg-iron of a 5x salary mortgage is something I would seriously question, and [desperate attempt to bring this back on topic] certainly not just for the sake of getting a lifetime sub on your TiVo


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## Dazbear (Aug 24, 2001)

In retrospect I should have taken out a lifetime sub. At the time £10 per month seemed easier to swallow than £200 on top of the £300 for the machine. By the time I felt I should pay the sub, TiVo's future wasnt looking very rosey!

I am now thinking of buying a life subbed and upgraded and networked TiVo off ebay and selling my old one to cover some of the costs.

So, what exactly can I do with TiVoweb - will it give me a whole new onscreen look if I download the right modules? Will I be able to sort programmes into folders etc? Is there a source for modules that I can go to?


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## cwaring (Feb 12, 2002)

Dazbear said:


> So, what exactly can I do with TiVoweb - will it give me a whole new onscreen look if I download the right modules? Will I be able to sort programmes into folders etc? Is there a source for modules that I can go to?


Not a lot to do with the on-screen look of Tivo. It's just a web-browser-based access to your Tivo with a lot of extra "bells and whistles" via available modules. There's just-about full list of available modules here.


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## Dazbear (Aug 24, 2001)

Thats a shame - has anyone thought of a way a giving TiVo different skins.

Would be cool!


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## ericd121 (Dec 12, 2002)

Dazbear said:


> So, what exactly can I do with TiVoweb - will it give me a whole new onscreen look if I download the right modules? Will I be able to sort programmes into folders etc? Is there a source for modules that I can go to?


These screenshots of my TivoWeb Themes might give you an idea of TivoWeb's possible usefulness.

*http://dixon.ws/tivo/lovely.html*


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## Dazbear (Aug 24, 2001)

I was thinking more skins for TiVos front end - the one you get on the tv screen.

Would be cool to be able to change this - after 4 years the blue clouds could do with changing (hehe).


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## chimaera (Nov 13, 2000)

blindlemon said:


> (now waits for the "I can't afford a mortgage" reply.....)


I'll keep my "paid off my mortgage" reply to myself then


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Dazbear said:


> I was thinking more skins for TiVos front end - the one you get on the tv screen.
> 
> Would be cool to be able to change this - after 4 years the blue clouds could do with changing (hehe).


Actually after adding a Cachecard to your Tivo and gaining web access you can hack the conventional Tivo interface that appears on the Tv in two ways that most people on here have done but now seem to have forgotten mention to you.

Firstly there is our very AerialPlug's Logos module which allows you to have channel logos appear to the right of every program entry in Now Playing showing you at a glance which channel it was recorded.

Secondly there is the program called Autospace which can be loaded every time the Tivo starts up and replaces the words Now Playing in the "Now Playing screen" with a bar graph display showing you both the total number of recordings now on the Tivo and the number of recordings that are "Save Until I Delete" saved until a certain date and Suggestions. There is a total for the number of recordings under each heading. So both these add on functions modify the Now Playing interface in a significant way.

Apart from all this Cachecard access means you can access your Tivo over the web from work and look at what is recorded on it and delete recordings or do Searches and set up new recordings.

Also the biggest benefits come if you also increase the hard drive capacity because you may then have say 200 recordings on your Tivo or more and Tivo Web lets you display them not just by recording order but by Program Name, Recording Size and one or two other options and then lets you block delete 20 recordings you may not need in one go.

Its also much easier to reorder Season Passes and loads of other things. There is also a brilliant module called Highlights which lets you look up the Radio Times Highlights program for the next week and directly set a recording on the Tivo with almost no effort. There is also a module to Backup the Season Passes and thumbs ratings data on your Tivo to your PC so they are protected when your Tivo hard drive fails. See the following for more information:-

www.steveconrad.co.uk/tivo/

www.ljay.org.uk

http://alt.org/wiki/index.php/TiVoWeb Modules

http://thomson.tivo.googlepages.com/usefultivoapplications

http://tivo.stevejenkins.com/network_cd.html

http://thomson.tivo.googlepages.com/tivowebplus

http://tivo.lightn.org/


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## cwaring (Feb 12, 2002)

Pete77 said:


> Actually after adding a Cachecard to your Tivo and gaining web access you can hack the conventional Tivo interface that appears on the Tv in two ways that most people on here have done but now seem to have forgotten mention to you.


To be fair, I don't really count those as a major change to the interface that I think the OP was thinking about. I would class those simply as 'minor cosmetic' changes. Not to belittle the efforts of those who wrote the MODS you understand


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Bu


cwaring said:


> To be fair, I don't really count those as a major change to the interface that I think the OP was thinking about. I would class those simply as 'minor cosmetic' changes. Not to belittle the efforts of those who wrote the MODS you understand


I have never been clear whether the main Tivo interface has never been more radically altered by anyone here because that would involve reverse engineering Tivo's software in a manner that would be considered a breach of copyright/patents or simply because it isn't actually technically possible with the level of access we have to the User Interface software?


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## cwaring (Feb 12, 2002)

Exactly  Which is why I said no when DazBear said...



Dazbear said:


> ...will it give me a whole new onscreen look...


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## Dazbear (Aug 24, 2001)

oh right 

So even the folders module, (I like the idea of filing programmes by genre or channel) will only show this on my pc screen not my tv?

(


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Yes, but if you have broadband you will be able to use it over the internet too


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## terryeden (Nov 2, 2002)

Dazbear said:


> I was thinking more skins for TiVos front end - the one you get on the tv screen.
> 
> Would be cool to be able to change this - after 4 years the blue clouds could do with changing (hehe).


You can change the TEXT of of most of the on screen menus. Really easy to do. see http://archive2.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=2799471#post2799471 for details.

My "TiVo Central" reads "Terry's Tivo" etc.

Terry


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## Dazbear (Aug 24, 2001)

ok!

I am now thinking of buying an upgraded TiVo from ebay - it is with lifetime sub.

What questions should I be asking? I have heard somewhere that a lifetime sub can only be swapped for free once. Is this right? Should I ask they guy if he is the original owner?


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Dazbear said:


> What questions should I be asking? I have heard somewhere that a lifetime sub can only be swapped for free once. Is this right? Should I ask they guy if he is the original owner?


Look to see if the ad understands the features and advantages of a Cachecard and Tivoweb properly and is not just a brief trader ad with no Tivo knowledge.

Also ask them what the Tivo Service Number is and then ring up and check with Tivo customer service that this Service Number has Lifetime Service.

Try to get a machine with a Cachecard 512MB of RAM, at least 200Gb hard drive and TivoWeb with lots of hacks installed.

The Lifetime Subs can be swapped an unlimited number of times. The only problem comes with the Evaluation Subs which only worked as long as the machine remains with the original owner (given to journalists and some stores for demonstator models). Get the Service Number before you buy or at least before you pay for the item and check with Tivo it is Lifetime and not Evaluation.

Hope this helps.


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