jwz: Those of you with Tivo may have noticed an irritating trend that the networks have started, of marking hour long shows as being 61 minutes long in the schedule. That extra minute will make Tivo skip recording a show on another channel that started at 9.
This strikes me as funny since the networks think they’re being smart while getting out played by a different PVR…
When the Comcast tech was at my house to install the new PVR box, he mentioned that a couple of times he had gotten a “Do you want to change this channel to record…” message, and was confused by it. After all, the PVR box has two tuners, so unless there’s two shows on at the same time, it shouldn’t matter.
I have gotten that same message a couple times already, but it’s actually a feature, rather than an error: the Comcast PVR pads a scheduled recording by a minute or two to each end of a scheduled show. For example, I told the PVR to pick up any episodes of “Drawn Together” while I was off watching something else; the two episodes were on at 10 and 10:30. At 9:58 the first DT episode started to get recorded. As 10:30 approached, I got the “change channel” message, but that makes sense: first tuner was recording to 10:32 and the second tuner – which I was watching TV with – was going to start recording at 10:28. Hence a conflict.
Long story short – far too late for that, I’m sure – Comcast’s PVR is helping us to fight this attempt to throw off our show recording even if they aren’t aware of it.
Yay for us!
Hmmm. I haven’t noticed that on the Comcast PVR. If so, I guess it’s a Good Feature, for just that reason.
but if that were so, I’d expect that the channels which are a minute early or so (e.g., Cartoon Network) would carry the whole show. Hmmm.
Ah. But that may be the Microsoft software, now that I think of it. The TV Guide iGuide doesn’t do it (though it will detect conflicts ahead of time, and will also let me manually say that a particular showor subscription should start a scosh early … or end early).
Seems like this should be easily addressed by the PVR. Shouldn’t it just record either the last minute of the first show or the first minute of the second show? Or 30 secs of each?
Well most PVR’s give you the option, of course. The Microsoft version seems to grab extra time as a matter of course… with the two tuners the only time you’d ever notice is if you have two shows run back to back, since it occupies two tuners at once. So far, still pretty happy with the box :)
This was a feature that I first saw in Microsoft’s UltimateTV and I miss it in my DirecTivo. You can pad by 5 minutes at the end, but not at the beginning. And it doesn’t happen automatically — it’s a setting that must be set for each show.