# Why is it going from the Pause state to Live TV without my asking?



## bvm42 (Dec 7, 2004)

My normal behavior is to pause the show I'm watching (from My Shows, never live), turn off the TV, and expect to return later to continue watching the show where I paused it. This worked flawlessly on my old HD. But on the Premiere, I frequently find that it's jumped to live TV when I come back in the morning after having paused the night before. Then I have to go search thru My Shows to try to remember where I was. Why??? And can it be avoided?

The first couple times it happened, it seemed like it might be because I had new messages, but that's no longer the case. And it doesn't happen every day, but often enough to be annoying. This is my biggest annoyance with the Premiere, second only to the lack of a button for "return to the recorded show I was watching, and which is tantalizingly playing in the preview window, but Tivo hasn't seen fit to provide any way to get straight to". Grr.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Two reason I've seen for this...

1) The TiVo is rebooting
2) The TiVo is getting an emergency alert

If you enable one of the back door codes, like 30 second skip or the clock, then you can tell if it's rebooting because those reset after a reboot.

If it happens but the backdoor code is not reset then it's likely an EAS. Part of the CableCARD spec requires devices to monitor the EAS stream and dump the user to a live TV channel when it's activated. However the TiVo is not smart enough to return to it's previous state after this happens.

One tip... If you press left on the remote, instead of the TiVo button, it should take you back to My Shows with the proper show and episode already selected.


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## Bierboy (Jun 12, 2004)

Dan203 said:


> ...If you enable one of the back door codes, like 30 second skip or the clock, then you can tell if it's rebooting because those reset after a reboot....


Negative....I've rebooted my XL4 with the 30SS enabled (backdoor code, not the TiVo "feature") and it's still enabled...not reset.


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## h2oskierc (Dec 16, 2010)

Out of curiosity, if you go to my shows and resume, does it resume from the proper location?


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Bierboy said:


> Negative....I've rebooted my XL4 with the 30SS enabled (backdoor code, not the TiVo "feature") and it's still enabled...not reset.


Hmmm... It use to reset. Maybe something the fixed in the most recent update?

Edit: You can also check the DVR diagnostics screen. It has an up counter for the OOB signal that you can use to calculate if your TiVo has rebooted.


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

Dan203 said:


> Hmmm... It use to reset. Maybe something the fixed in the most recent update?


 30SS was made sticky way back in 11.x software so even my S3 OLED unit doesn't lose it upon reboot.


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## jrtroo (Feb 4, 2008)

Zoom gets you to the program in the window directly with one button.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

moyekj said:


> 30SS was made sticky way back in 11.x software so even my S3 OLED unit doesn't lose it upon reboot.


It's been a long time since I used it. My wife uses the little clock though and I know that use to always go away on her S3 when it rebooted. Not sure about her Premiere though.


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## djwilso (Dec 23, 2006)

Dan203 said:


> It's been a long time since I used it. My wife uses the little clock though and I know that use to always go away on her S3 when it rebooted. Not sure about her Premiere though.


The clock is still not sticky.


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## bvm42 (Dec 7, 2004)

Dan203 said:


> Two reason I've seen for this...
> 
> 1) The TiVo is rebooting


Nope, not a reboot. I have the clock enabled, and since that doesn't survive a reboot, and it's still up, I know there was no reboot.


> 2) The TiVo is getting an emergency alert... Part of the CableCARD spec requires devices to monitor the EAS stream and dump the user to a live TV channel when it's activated. However the TiVo is not smart enough to return to it's previous state after this happens.


Hmm, interesting feature. We do get emergency alerts sometimes. No way to tell whether that's it, of course, but I'll bet you're right. I remember recently looking over my wife's shoulder when she was watching one of her shows on my old HD Tivo. Suddenly an emergency alert was displayed, and when it was over, she was surprisingly on live tv.

(It occurs to me that I only ran that Tivo with a CableCard for a short while before moving up to the Premier, so my claim that the HD "did it right" is based on relatively little evidence .)


> One tip... If you press left on the remote, instead of the TiVo button, it should take you back to My Shows with the proper show and episode already selected.


No, not in this situation--Left takes me to the main menu. Left only does what you describe when I'm currently watching a recorded show.

And to answer someone else's question, yes, when I navigated down to the show that I had been watching and resume it, it does resume from the proper location.


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## abqdan (Aug 29, 2012)

As a pretty new Tivo user, I just thought this was normal behavior. If I leave a show paused for a while (not sure how long) when I go back the Tivo has gone back to Live TV. Sometimes I'll be upstairs doing something, and hear the TV suddenly start up - when I've left the current show paused. I'll try and time it sometime to see whether the time it takes for that to happen is consistent.


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## sharkster (Jul 3, 2004)

Dan203 said:


> It's been a long time since I used it. My wife uses the little clock though and I know that use to always go away on her S3 when it rebooted. Not sure about her Premiere though.


I use the little clock on my bdrm Premiere and, yes, it does go away whenever I have restarted the Tivo.

What I do is that I keep the book for the Premiere in my nightstand and, on a post-it note, I wrote the commands to get the clock back and stuck that in the inside cover of the Tivo manual.

That just makes it easy for me because won't otherwise remember how to get the clock back.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Edit to remove the stupid parts.


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## sharkster (Jul 3, 2004)

abqdan said:


> As a pretty new Tivo user, I just thought this was normal behavior. If I leave a show paused for a while (not sure how long) when I go back the Tivo has gone back to Live TV. Sometimes I'll be upstairs doing something, and hear the TV suddenly start up - when I've left the current show paused. I'll try and time it sometime to see whether the time it takes for that to happen is consistent.


That has been my experience, too.


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## Jonathan_S (Oct 23, 2001)

bvm42 said:


> And to answer someone else's question, yes, when I navigated down to the show that I had been watching and resume it, it does resume from the proper location.


Interesting. That tells us that whatever the issue is it doesn't involve the TiVo unpausing.

If the TiVo unpaused your (recorded show) it would play to the end, the keep/delete pop-up would time out after a bit (30 seconds?) taking you to now playing, which would time out to live tv after 5 minutes. But in this scenario if you went back to the show it shouldn't offer to let you resume because the final 'played to' point was the end of the recording.

So it looks like some behavior is causing it to jump from a paused recorded to live TV without ever unpausing. Weird.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

abqdan said:


> As a pretty new Tivo user, I just thought this was normal behavior. If I leave a show paused for a while (not sure how long) when I go back the Tivo has gone back to Live TV. Sometimes I'll be upstairs doing something, and hear the TV suddenly start up - when I've left the current show paused. I'll try and time it sometime to see whether the time it takes for that to happen is consistent.


Are you talking about a recorded show? Or something you're watching live? If it's live then once it hits the end of the 30 minute buffer it will start playing again. If it's a recorded show it should never do this. The only time it drops to live TV is if you leave the TiVo sitting in one of the menus. If you pause it on a recoded show then it will stay on that show forever except in the case os an EAS.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Dan203 said:


> Are you talking about a recorded show? Or something you're watching live? If it's live then once it hits the end of the 30 minute buffer it will start playing again. If it's a recorded show it should never do this. The only time it drops to live TV is if you leave the TiVo sitting in one of the menus. If you pause it on a recoded show then it will stay on that show forever except in the case os an EAS.


If you leave it in the menus it goes back to live TV after awhile as a sort of screen saver.

Maybe they've got another, perhaps recently added, level of screensaver that kicks in after a few hours of paused playback.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

My wife always pauses her TiVo on something before she turns it off or switches to another TiVo. If it were dropping back to live TV trust me I'd have heard about it. (she always complains because I don't do that and the sound from live TV startles her when she switches to my TiVo or turns on the TV and it's already set to mine)


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## Tico (Dec 10, 2002)

The Zoom button will return you to whatever is in the preview window.


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## bvm42 (Dec 7, 2004)

Tico said:


> The Zoom button will return you to whatever is in the preview window.


Thank you!!!! I wonder where that little nugget is documented. Not in the Tivo user guide. A Google search turned it up on the Tivo blog from a month ago. I wonder what other little tricks I'm missing out on...


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## bvm42 (Dec 7, 2004)

abqdan said:


> As a pretty new Tivo user, I just thought this was normal behavior. If I leave a show paused for a while (not sure how long) when I go back the Tivo has gone back to Live TV. Sometimes I'll be upstairs doing something, and hear the TV suddenly start up - when I've left the current show paused. I'll try and time it sometime to see whether the time it takes for that to happen is consistent.


It seems unlikely to me that there is a timeout of that sort. It would have to be a pretty long one, and then what would be the point? I regularly pause the TV in the morning before leaving for work, and I pretty much always find it still paused when I turn the TV on in the evening. It's just the next morning that I find it on live TV. I suspect my cable company likes to run frequent EAS tests overnight when they won't disturb many people. Well, other than certain Tivo users.


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## Bierboy (Jun 12, 2004)

bvm42 said:


> ... I regularly pause the TV in the morning before leaving for work, and I pretty much always find it still paused when I turn the TV on in the evening.....


That's impossible with only a 30-minute buffer...


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## Jonathan_S (Oct 23, 2001)

Bierboy said:


> That's impossible with only a 30-minute buffer...


I assume he mean "paused a recorded program" not "paused live TV". After all that's the point of this thread, whether (pre-recorded) programs will stay paused indefinitely or not.

(And in my experience, and apparently in bvm42's, they do stay paused)


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