# Extra minute not recorded on back-to-back recordings



## GotATiVoToo (Apr 20, 2002)

Hi,

I have a Premiere Elite. I have a season pass set for The Mentalist on TNT, and it's set to record an extra minute. There are two episodes of The Mentalist on TNT on Mondays, back to back: 8-9pm, then 9-10pm. As is typical, they run the episodes slightly past their times. Thus the extra minute on my season pass.

I watched the first episode, and I was surprised to find that the TiVo bar showed the recording as being 59 minutes long. When I got to the end, the recording was cut off right at the very end.

I played the 9-10pm episode, and found that this episode is 1:01 in length, and the last few moments of the 8-9 episode were picked up on that episode.

I checked My Shows, and only two programs were recording at 9pm (one of them being The Mentalist).

So: why didn't the TiVo record the extra minute on my 8-9pm episode?? I expected that it would use two of the tuners -- recording one episode from 8:00-9:01, and using a second tuner so it could record 9:00-10:01.


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## Revolutionary (Dec 1, 2004)

Check your season pass setup. Are you sure you don't have the season pass padded 1 minute at the beginning and not the end? If the first recording stopped at 8:59, that's actually 2 minutes early (assuming it is set to stop at 9:01). If the second recording included the last minute or so of the first recording, then it started at 8:59, not 9:00. That suggests the show is set to pad at the beginning (possibly at the end too, but I'd expect both recordings to be 1 min longer). If that's the case, remove the front-end padding.

Do you have something else recording at 9:00 on the other tuner?


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## GotATiVoToo (Apr 20, 2002)

Hi, thanks for your suggestions!

The season pass is set to record an extra minute only at the end, repeats & first run, keep until space needed. 

I do need to correct something I wrote earlier, though. I went and looked at the two episodes again, and actually the TiVo bar for the 8-9pm show shows 1h1m for the length of the show, which is what it was set to record (an hour, plus an extra minute). It's just that the last little smidgen of the bar isn't filled in green, and when playing, the show stops apparently right at the spot where the 9pm show started to record. 

The play indicator shows 59m at that point, but I bet it's really like 59 minutes and 59 seconds or something similar. So, I believe the recording essentially stopped at 9, and didn't record the extra minute.

As I mentioned, there were only two shows recording at 9 (and two at 8). Since the Elite has four tuners, it should have easily recorded the extra minute of the 8-9 show while simultaneously recording the beginning of the 9-10. My Series3 did this regularly when there were tuners available for similar back-to-back shows.

(Mmmm. Forbidden donuts... )


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## Revolutionary (Dec 1, 2004)

Oh, sorry, you did say two shows at 9. I read that as 2 shows at 8. :-/

That is truly odd. My Series3 (which gave up the ghost yesterday, sadly) behaves exactly as you describe. I ordered an Elite last night - I'll have to watch for this same behavior.

The only thing I can think of is that perhaps the software for the Elite isn't properly optimized for the two additional tuners. On the S3 et sequens models, your circumstance would have presented a clipping scenario (because the tuners are loaded, something has to get clipped for that extra minute). Assuming the OTHER show on at 9:00 was higher priority than "The Mentalist" (so that a recording of "The Mentalist" would not clip it), then the tuning logic would default to prioritizing the beginning of the show over the end (for the same show) (IIRC - it's been a while since I've seen a discussion on clipping). So I think the behavior your seeing is correct for the S3. But since there are 2 other idle tuners on the Elite, it shouldn't have happened.

Sounds like a bug, maybe? I'd report it.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Revolutionary said:


> Oh, sorry, you did say two shows at 9. I read that as 2 shows at 8. :-/
> 
> That is truly odd. My Series3 (which gave up the ghost yesterday, sadly) behaves exactly as you describe. I ordered an Elite last night - I'll have to watch for this same behavior.
> 
> ...


i t would clip only if you have clipping enabled. I disable that on all my TiVos. I prefer to have the lower priority not recorded than to have part of a show cut off.
I only have a couple of shows that I have the recordings extended by a minute. But so far I have not run into this issue with my Elites. But I'm also not sure if they have ever encountered this situation with two shows from an SP with a minute extension being recorded back to back.

I guess I need to setup an SP to specifically test it out.


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## rainwater (Sep 21, 2004)

Yes, disable clipping unless you just don't care about the beginning or ending of shows. I really hate this feature and the worst part is it is enabled by default on TiVos.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

GotATiVoToo said:


> I do need to correct something I wrote earlier, though. I went and looked at the two episodes again, and actually the TiVo bar for the 8-9pm show shows 1h1m for the length of the show, which is what it was set to record (an hour, plus an extra minute). It's just that the last little smidgen of the bar isn't filled in green, and when playing, the show stops apparently right at the spot where the 9pm show started to record.


If the bar isn't filled in green, you lost the signal during part of the show.. perhaps it was at the very end (seemingly unlikely), or during the middle?

No, I don't know why you say it didn't actually record into the next show.. but if the time bar shows 1:01, but the bar isn't full, losing signal is the reason that happens.


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## oViTynoT (May 18, 2007)

So, I guess there's a bit of a mis-wording on the CLIPPING setup...

it says "If you have two or more programs ...."

On an Elite, I'm guessing that should be changed to "If you have FOUR or more..."


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## celtic pride (Nov 8, 2005)

i have been having the same problem on my tivo premiere xls, they will record 1 hour and 59 minutes instead of 2 hours on movies,and my shows like whitney or rules of engagement only record 29 minutess so i miss the last part of almost every 30 minute program i record. so how can i change this on my tivo s?


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## Stormydog (Oct 13, 2010)

I understand how Season Pass priorities affect which shows have precedence. I too suffer the very last part of shows not being recorded because networks shift their times just enough to cause this. I have not tried adding an extra minute because I have so many Season Passes and find it extremely difficult to know which show will impact another. Just scrolling thru Season Passes does not make this easy as you have no idea what show is after that Season Pass unless you made a paper graph and have to then maintain settings by referring to that. I know of no easy way to view or see where conflicts could arise.


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## GotATiVoToo (Apr 20, 2002)

I do have clipping enabled, for what it's worth. On the Series3, if a show was either clipped or if a signal loss occurred, there would be a "(partial)" indication on the show details screen. I didn't have such an indication on that episode of The Mentalist.

By the way, it definitely didn't lose signal, unless it's possible for one tuner to lose signal and another not (which seems really unlikely in the M-card universe). I can say that it definitely didn't happen because the other recording (the second episode of The Mentalist) recorded from the point where the other one dropped out, and all the way through to the end. So, there was signal the whole time.

Just to add further confusion, the same Season Pass recorded two back-to-back episodes of The Mentalist this week, and this week, both were extended by a minute, exactly as they should have been.

To me, this seems like a bug. What's the best avenue to report it?


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## ltxi (Feb 14, 2010)

What you experienced is the way I believe it's supposed to work with potential conflicts. You lost nothing and the other tuner remained free. Just intelligent software implementation to optimize capability. Mine do this and I'm ok with it.


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## Arcady (Oct 14, 2004)

Why don't you just add 60 minutes to the end? The TiVo will fail to record the second episode, but both episodes will be in the one recording with no cut-off or gaps.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Then you have to manually intervene. I set up my season Passes and typically don't touch them again. That's why I like the TiVos. I don't want to be constantly checking to see what is coming on like I did in the 80's and 90's with VCRs. The last show I had to add time to the SP was the show Touch. Because American Idol made a couple of episodes start and end a couple of minutes late.


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## cwashizawa (Apr 4, 2012)

I have ran into the same issues recording past episodes of Friends on TBS from 4-6pm. I added a minute of recording time, but in the end I just decided to go back to the default season pass settings so I have an additional tuner to record other shows. I have a Tivo Premiere, if I had an Elite with the extra tuners, then I probably would have opted for recording an extra minute, but then you still have to watch the same starting 30 seconds on the next showing.

In the end there's no real perfect solution and I can live with the fact of missing the last 30 seconds of the last showing of the day.


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## NYHeel (Oct 7, 2003)

A little bit of a thread hijack but there's just no reason Tivos can't record overlapping content on the same channel on one tuner. The Directv DVRs can do it and I just don't understand why Tivo can't add this feature.

What I'm saying is that if I record the 8:00-9:00 show on CBS on Sunday night with 1 hour of padding and also record the 9:00-10:00 show on CBS, the Tivo uses 2 separate tuners for those recordings on CBS. The Directv DVR only uses 1 tuner for CBS in that scenario.


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## L David Matheny (Jan 29, 2011)

NYHeel said:


> A little bit of a thread hijack but there's just no reason Tivos can't record overlapping content on the same channel on one tuner. The Directv DVRs can do it and I just don't understand why Tivo can't add this feature.
> 
> What I'm saying is that if I record the 8:00-9:00 show on CBS on Sunday night with 1 hour of padding and also record the 9:00-10:00 show on CBS, the Tivo uses 2 separate tuners for those recordings on CBS. The Directv DVR only uses 1 tuner for CBS in that scenario.


It's been suggested before that TiVo should implement one-tuner overlap between sequential recordings on the same channel (by splitting the transport stream or copying some blocks or whatever). That is a great feature, and DVRs of TiVo's caliber should have it. But such a change could be relatively simple or very messy depending on exactly how the program code was written. And we can't see TiVo's program code.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

I hope you make that suggestion whenever you talk to Tivo or fill out surveys. That is the exact suggestion I make every time -- it would essentially double the # of tuners for me.


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## GotATiVoToo (Apr 20, 2002)

As aaronwt said, I have no intention of manually intervening to catch back-to-back shows like this. I agree completely with his sentiment: this is what the DVR should do for me!

It seems clear to me after my experience tonight that there is a serious bug in the TiVo's logic. Here's what happened.

I have "The Finder" set to record as a season pass with an extra minute. It was on tonight on KTVU from 8:00 to 9:00pm, so it should have recorded from 8:00 -> 9:01.

Here's what actually recorded:

Finder 8:00 -> 9:00 on KTVU
The Universe 8:01 -> 9:01 on HSTRY
Washington Week 8:00 -> 8:30 on KQED
Nikita 8:00 -> 9:00 on KBCW

CSI:NY: 9:00 -> 10:00 on 
Fringe: 9:00 -> 10:00 on KTVU - caught the end of Finder

*NONE* of the other shows in that list were actually scheduled to record. They are all TiVo Suggestions.

At 9pm, in addition to the two 9 -> 10 shows, there was a tuner available to record the last minute of The Universe, *and* there was a tuner free that could have recorded Fringe starting at 9, rather than cutting off the show I actually wanted and hiding the end of it on a show that is buried in the "TiVo Suggestions" folder!

This is broken. Broken, broken, broken. A TiVo Suggestion should never, ever take precedence over something I have actually set to record, even if it's just clipping off the extra minute.

So, really, what's the best avenue to report a bug to TiVo? This is unacceptable.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Is clipping turned on and causing this? I don't have clipping enabled (I have never used it) but I also don't use suggestions either.


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## GotATiVoToo (Apr 20, 2002)

Clipping is turned on, but again, every other show that recorded was a suggestion. A suggestion should never clip an actually-scheduled show.


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## slowbiscuit (Sep 19, 2006)

mattack said:


> I hope you make that suggestion whenever you talk to Tivo or fill out surveys. That is the exact suggestion I make every time -- it would essentially double the # of tuners for me.


If they were going to do this they would have done it years ago, it's just not important to them (or is too difficult to incorporate into their file-handling code).

I think a lot of the software devs here fail to understand why they can't do this because the fix appears straightforward from the outside looking in, but they have their reasons.


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## rainwater (Sep 21, 2004)

slowbiscuit said:


> I think a lot of the software devs here fail to understand why they can't do this because the fix appears straightforward from the outside looking in, but they have their reasons.


It would have to be done realtime though which I don't think it possible given the processor power. And it would definitely require rewriting the database system used. It would be an large amount of work for sure and I'm not even sure it could be accomplished in a way that was user friendly.


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## slowbiscuit (Sep 19, 2006)

You have no idea what it would require, any more than I do.


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## justen_m (Jan 15, 2004)

slowbiscuit said:


> You have no idea what it would require, any more than I do.


I think I do. The change would be a 10 minute fix. To be stable, tested code, much more work. Changing the code would require a large amount of testing to verify. I built stuff that, if wrong, would kill people. ****ing up Tivo isn't that level of seriousness, but maybe the engineers at Tivo have my mindset.


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## rainwater (Sep 21, 2004)

slowbiscuit said:


> You have no idea what it would require, any more than I do.


I know what type of hardware is in a TiVo and how it can process video. There's no way it is a simple fix. Even on a powerful PC this is more complicated than people want to believe. Sharing data chunks adds so many more conditions that have to be accounted for, that if someone thinks this is a 10 minute fix, they are sorely mistaken. So if you want to play a video but are given a message that you must wait while the TiVo processes a chunk of video from a previous recording, I'm sure no one on this forum would complain about that either.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

slowbiscuit said:


> If they were going to do this they would have done it years ago, it's just not important to them (or is too difficult to incorporate into their file-handling code).


Well, you could say that about other things -- they finally added a capacity gauge (though IMHO in an almost-useless way, but at least it's there).

I'm not saying I actually think it will be implemented.. but survey questions do make me think about DVR functionality rather than new stuff that I will rarely if ever use.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

rainwater said:


> I know what type of hardware is in a TiVo and how it can process video. There's no way it is a simple fix. Even on a powerful PC this is more complicated than people want to believe. Sharing data chunks adds so many more conditions that have to be accounted for, that if someone thinks this is a 10 minute fix, they are sorely mistaken. So if you want to play a video but are given a message that you must wait while the TiVo processes a chunk of video from a previous recording, I'm sure no one on this forum would complain about that either.


What does the DISH DVR do when you save a recording from primetime anytime to "permanent recordings"? Does it make a copy? Is there a delay?

I do think that this issue could be fixed in a variety of ways.. the simplest being actually duplicating the video.. (who knows, even prevent you from watching the area with the duplication until it's done copying).. Other more sophisticated ways being essentially ref-counting the video, so there is only one copy but multiple files refer to that minute of overlap..

Regardless, I would pay $100 per Tivo for this simple function, even though I already have lifetime.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

mattack said:


> Well, you could say that about other things -- they finally added a capacity gauge (though IMHO in an almost-useless way, but at least it's there).
> 
> ...........


What would be a useful way for it? I thought it did what people want? It shows how much space is left by a percentage, which is all that most people would understand anyway. Of course there is no way to know how much you can put in that space since equal length recordings from four different channels can all take up completely different amounts of space.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

aaronwt said:


> What would be a useful way for it?...
> Of course there is no way to know how much you can put in that space since equal length recordings from four different channels can all take up completely different amounts of space.


I realize that different channels can take up widely varying amounts of space.. So given the existing hardware(*), doing something like what the System Information screen tells you would be useful.. I am making up numbers.
You have 10 hours of highest possible HD recording
You have 30 hours of typical HD quality
You have 60 hours of typical SD quality
You have 300 hours of analog basic quality

Word it slightly more user friendly somehow.. Basically, a time amount as well as a percentage amount.. I use the free space meter on my hard drive/DVD recorder MANY TIMES A DAY, to know if there's enough room to record what's going to record (nowadays, mostly analog backup recordings, and things I dub from my Tivos). Yes, it has the advantage of recording at an exact bit rate, so can give me a close-to-exact amount of space left. (Actually, it *under*estimates it slightly, I'm not sure if on purpose. E.g. if it says I have 2 hours left at the lowest quality recording, I think I have about 2:10 left.. but I don't rely on that.)

(*) Even though I am slightly a videophile in some ways, I wish the hardware OPTIONALLY worked like old Tivos, in that it could recompress the digital signal (realtime, just like obviously it does from the analog tuner on ones that have the analog tuner).. In that not-actually-true case, it could give an exact time. For things like music shows, I wouldn't do the theoretical recompression. But for most prime time shows, I'd probably recompress to the equivalent of analog basic. It would still look way better than actual channels in most cases -- as I prove when I dub to my XS32.


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## slowbiscuit (Sep 19, 2006)

Old Tivos had to do an analog-to-digital conversion to store it on disk, so you could specify compression. Tivos now get a digital compressed mpeg2 stream (usually) and the only way to do what you suggest is to transcode to h.264 which takes a lot of horsepower to do without custom SOCs.


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## MichaelK (Jan 10, 2002)

slowbiscuit said:


> If they were going to do this they would have done it years ago, it's just not important to them (or is too difficult to incorporate into their file-handling code).
> 
> I think a lot of the software devs here fail to understand why they can't do this because the fix appears straightforward from the outside looking in, but they have their reasons.


I've often wondered if their reasons are patent related....


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

slowbiscuit said:


> Old Tivos had to do an analog-to-digital conversion to store it on disk, so you could specify compression. Tivos now get a digital compressed mpeg2 stream (usually) and the only way to do what you suggest is to transcode to h.264 which takes a lot of horsepower to do without custom SOCs.


Actually, all but the Elite have an analog to digital converter.. You wouldn't really need to transcode it, *with slightly different hardware* you could essentially reroute the analog outputs back through the A/D converter.. That's what my XS32 does when you do rate-conversion dubbing (which is realtime of course).

Yes it would be hokey, but would be useful for space reasons.


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## jmpage2 (Jan 21, 2004)

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but I ran into something similar and thought best to add to this thread than create a new one.

I'm confused about how this works as for the first time ever I ran into a similar problem in which two of my season pass shows had a minute clipped at the start of the program.

The wrinkle with my setup is that I have a 4-tuner Elite but have one tuner unavailable so that TiVo Minis can watch Live TV.

Here's the full gist of what happened;

1. An episode of "The Office" was recording from 8:29 to 9:01 This show has a 1 minute pad at the beginning and end of the program.

2. I had two season passes scheduled to record at 9:00 PM... "Hannibal" and "Elementary". Neither of these shows has padding.

3. What TiVo did was clip a minute from BOTH Elementary and Hannibal.... but at most only one show should have been clipped.... I have three tuners available.

Can anyone explain what happened? Should I shut clipping off? This was really annoying.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

No idea what the issue was but from what you said I wouldn't have expected it to be clipped since you have three tuners available for recording and only three shows to record. Personally I prefer not to miss any part of a show so I've always had clipping turned off.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

This doesn't answer your question at all, but I could swear that one or BOTH of Hannibal or Elementary "officially" starts at 9:01 (in your time zone, 10:01 in mine).

Are you sure there wasn't something else clipping it?


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## jmpage2 (Jan 21, 2004)

mattack said:


> This doesn't answer your question at all, but I could swear that one or BOTH of Hannibal or Elementary "officially" starts at 9:01 (in your time zone, 10:01 in mine).
> 
> Are you sure there wasn't something else clipping it?


I'm sure. The only recording happening before those programs began was "The Office".... and, there was only one red record LED lit on the front of the TiVo prior to those programs beginning.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

TiVo is so dumb. It should be able to use the same tuner to record to two shows at once off the same channel for that one minute in the middle. I doubt it would be rocket science to do.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

Bigg said:


> TiVo is so dumb. It should be able to use the same tuner to record to two shows at once off the same channel for that one minute in the middle. I doubt it would be rocket science to do.


You're right, this is probably my #1 wish nowadays (since we now have a "ton" of tuners).. But IIRC, NOT all other DVRs do this either. Some do, but some don't.

Heck, at least when it *first* came out (I do not know if this has been fixed), Primetime Anytime on DISH did *not* properly save off 'padding'. (Recording all of primetime, then even "manually" saving off shows with padding on each end pretty much solves the tuner dilemma.)

So basically, Tivo's not worse than most of them.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

mattack said:


> You're right, this is probably my #1 wish nowadays (since we now have a "ton" of tuners).. But IIRC, NOT all other DVRs do this either. Some do, but some don't.
> 
> Heck, at least when it *first* came out (I do not know if this has been fixed), Primetime Anytime on DISH did *not* properly save off 'padding'. (Recording all of primetime, then even "manually" saving off shows with padding on each end pretty much solves the tuner dilemma.)
> 
> So basically, Tivo's not worse than most of them.


Agreed. It just seems that TiVo should be ahead of the pack and held to a higher standard since they are selling a premium, "aftermarket" product that's not just another crappy MSO box.

DISH's Hopper is a neat device, but it's basically a 2-tuner box, as PTAT uses one, so you're left with 2 tuners for everything else, I'd much rather have TiVo's 4 tuners.


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