My Tivo Ate My 24 Series Premiere

/ Adam Nash

I hate to post anything that even resembles something bad about Tivo, but…

My DirecTivo ate my 24 series premiere.  Or more accurately, it failed to record the second 2-hour block last night.

I caught it part way through.  At 8:45pm, nothing was recording.  When I checked, I saw that for some reason, while my Season Pass was there for 24, the guide showed “no upcoming episodes”.  That was strange, since obviously one was playing on the screen.

I hit record, and ran to the bedroom to discover, thankfully, that my 2nd DirecTivo was recording the show correctly.

Phew.

But how bad was this problem?  I had a problem like this 2 weeks ago, when the Scrubs premiere failed to record.  All the other shows recorded fine, but Scrubs was showing “no upcoming episodes” even though there clearly were shows in the guide.

I found this post on PVRWire which went into some detail about problems people were having.   I don’t buy the conspiracy theories about DirecTV trying to ruin people’s Tivo experience to get them to “upgrade” to the craptastic box that is the DirecTV-branded DVR.  But bugs and issues can and do happen, and it made me realize how much I depend on my Tivo “just working”.

I double-checked my To Do list for the week, and I discovered no less than four other shows that had the same problem.  I manually added them to the To Do list, but I’m worried.  I hope they fix this problem soon.

A spokesperson on CNET has said “it is aware of the problem and should have it fixed by this evening (last Friday).” However, at this point in time DirecTiVo users are continuing to report problems.

7 thoughts on “My Tivo Ate My 24 Series Premiere”

  1. I had that problem with one of our TiVos, which for some reason just couldn’t bring itself to record Penn & Teller: Bullsh!t unless I instructed it to tape each episode. Fortunately, that TiVo got demoted to bedroom duty when we moved up to HD.

  2. Scott,

    While I appreciate the comment, I have to call foul on any sort of slam on Tivo, either implied or otherwise, that would promote the use of any other DVR. That’s just one step too far, my friend. 🙂

    In all honesty, we still haven’t moved up to HD yet because of the lack of a good Tivo solution. Given DirecTV’s handling of the DVR situation, it looks like it’s either Tivo Series 3 or Tivo on Comcast HD box in 2007 for us.

  3. Sounds like the perfect opportunity to give iTunes TV downloads a test drive. I know you don’t want to consider any other DVR (I’ll save my anti-TiVo-interface rant for another time), but DVR in general only solves the broadcast TV time-shifting problem. iTunes is attacking it from the other angle, by bypassing the broadcast model all together. It’ll take a while before they’re truly competitive enough to penetrate the mass market, but if they have their way we’ll be buying our TV shows a la carte before too long. I’ve been doing this with BSG, Heroes and season 3 of Lost, and it’s wonderfully addictive.

    I’m not 100% convinced that the iTunes model will replace broadcast any time soon. But the Apple TV interface is so much simpler than TiVo that it’s beginning to look like a pretty compelling alternative.

  4. Ray,

    I’m with you 100% on Apple TV. I think I’m going to get 4 of them. One for each TV, and one for the minivan, so it can load up on content while it’s parked in the driveway… 🙂

    – Adam

  5. One for the minivan? You know you can already plug your iPod into the minivan TV, right? It would take up a lot less room, and be a heck of a lot easier to run power to.

    Personally, I would love to see what Steve Perlman thinks of Apple TV. He was an Apple guy from back in the day, and his long-term visions for WebTV looked a heck of a lot like what Apple TV is headed toward (except that Perlman was going for a TV-and-download model, rather than download-only).

  6. Actually, I’m probably in the “TV and download” camp myself. However, the nice thing about Apple TV is that it doesn’t care where the content came from, as long as it’s MP4 and in iTunes, you are good. So, for example, I think ripping your DVDs to iTunes makes sense, just like ripping your CDs to iTunes made sense.

    I think Apple TV could actually move the DVR from “one per TV” to a single one for the house, centrally located. I’m going to look into seeing if there can’t be a DVR solution that automatically records shows, rips them to MP4, adds cover art, and then adds to iTunes. Presto – Apple TV does it all 🙂

    I originally was thinking of a Mac Mini for the minivan, but the AppleTV is better. I want wireless synch that I can manage.

    – Adam

  7. Yeah, ripping DVDs into iTunes would be great. But the movie studios are being more proactive than the music companies were, so (as far as I know) you can’t do that in iTunes yet. There might be some wacky back door method of getting things into the right format, but if it’s not built in and easy to do it’s only the uber-geeks that will go through the effort.

    I know there are separate Apple-centric bits you can put together to make an Apple DVR. In my blog post about the Apple TV, a buddy of mine outlined his plans for just such a setup. Getting it from there to iTunes, though, I’m not sure.

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