# More sophisticated decision making



## mfulton (Mar 26, 2004)

One of the most frustrating things for me about TiVo is the extremely simplistic control over recording priority. The simple list we have for the season passes just doesn't cut it. It's simply not always possible to arrange the show order to accomodate things that are USUALLY but not always on different nights.

Let's say that I have "CSI: Miami" in my season pass manager at position #3. Normally this show is aired on Monday night, but it's not at all uncommon for CBS to air repeats on Saturday. However, all I care about is the Monday airing. I don't want TiVo recording repeats on other nights instead of other shows that might be farther down the season pass list.

Give the user the option to specify how the season pass applies to first-run or repeats separately for each day of the week. That is, tell it to record ANY episode of CSI:Miami as long as it's on Monday, but for any other day of the week, it should only record FIRST-RUN episodes. We might also have a third option that lets us record repeats on any night, but which gives OTHER first-run shows priority over repeats. This allows us to set an overall priority, but also allows us to avoid surprises when the schedule changes.

(I suspect it does part of this now, particularily the first-run versus repeats thing, but it's not happening at a level where the user has control.)

Of course, this brings us to another problem... first run shows are often marked as repeats in the guide. That needs to be fixed. Period. In the meantime, TiVo could override the "repeat" flag if the first-aired date matches the current date.

The other thing TiVo really needs to do is figure out how to have multiple boxes in the same home talk to each other to avoid redundancies in recording. With two machines, I find that it's useful to have a certain amount of overlap between the season pass lists. Sometimes it keeps me from missing something. However, it also means that there are times that the same show is recorded separately on each machine, and in some of those cases, it means that I STILL missed something. If TiVo could consolidate the recording schedule across multiple machines, this could easily be avoided.


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## Jonathan_S (Oct 23, 2001)

mfulton said:


> Of course, this brings us to another problem... first run shows are often marked as repeats in the guide. That needs to be fixed. Period. In the meantime, TiVo could override the "repeat" flag if the first-aired date matches the current date.


I'm not sure what TiVo could do to fix the guide data. But for recording decisions it does use the original air date, not the repeat flag.

Assuming complete guide data:
If the OAD is no more than 28 days ago, and the TiVo hasn't recording this episode (based on its episode ID) yet, and you haven't manually canceled a recording of this episode, then it is considered First Run.


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## mfulton (Mar 26, 2004)

I don't know what TiVo might do to fix the guide data, but if they're not already screaming at the provider to give them more accurate info, then I'd put that on the to-do list.


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