Tivo Question
 

I'm running into some problems with some of the season passes I have set up, because I let the shows record two minutes longer than they normally would because I seem to miss the ends of some shows and want to be on the safe side.

To try to work around this I want to mess around with the season passes, but I don't know how customizable they are. For example, I'm taping Stern as a season pass, but it tapes the 11 and 11:30 shows along with 2:00 and 2:30 shows which are the same shows. If I could get Tivo to only tape the second showing I could avoid the conflict with Home Movies. Is there a way to do this without manually deleting every first showing of Stern in the upcoming shows listings?

Well, you could always change it from a Season Pass to record that channel at that time everyday.

If you put the earlier show as a higher Season Pass priority (and keep the 2 minute overrun), it should record both.

That's what I am doing at the moment, but I was hoping there was a workaround where I could choose to only record the later showing without setting the time manually. I guess setting the time manually would be my easiest workaround though.

I have the same issue with The Daily Show. You need to set up distinct season passes with the time and channel and day of week.

For example:
The Daily Show is (not daily after all ;)) on like 4 times a day. I have a season pass setup for Comedy Central at 11PM on Monday to run for 30 minutes
Another for Tuesday, Wed, and Thurs.

The reason for this is that The Daily Show has no discrete program information so Tivo doesn't know that each show is the same.

Damn, you just reminded me to tape the daily show. That's another conflict I'm going to have now. I just got satellite on Saturday, and I already feel like I need another tivo unit. I didn't know you could set up season passes for times of day. This could work out if I can tape shows that play multiple times a day at offpeak hours.

Manual Recording Season Passes. I record The Daily Show at 1am, using 4 MRSPs (1 for each day Tues-Fri).

If you watch every day, you could make a standard SP, set the KEEP AT MOST setting to 1, and put it low on the SP list. Then it would record it at open spots when more important shows are not recording.

You said "satellite". Did you get a DirecTiVo (2-tuner, auto-conflict correction goodness), a regular Directv receiver/SA Tivo hookup, or a Dish Network/SA TiVo combo ?

I hate stations that do that. MTV is the worst offender. I don't think I even saw specific information for the Spiderman cartoon until last week's airings.

I have a DirecTivo with two tuners. The series 2 from Philips. What do you mean by auto-conflict correction?

Say you have SP's for 3 shows scheduled at the same time - 11:00 news, Howard Stern and The Daily Show.

I have the 11:00 news at the top of the SP list, Keep At Most = 1. Stern is 12th on the list, Daily Show is 36th. The TiVo software looks for alternate showings of episodes when it builds the To Do list, so in this case -
- the news, in the #1 slot, is always recorded.
- Stern is next on the list, so the second tuner switches to that at 11.
- The Daily Show is lowest of the 3, so it looks for another showing of the 11:00 episode. It finds it at 1am, so it records that one.

Mind you, this setup presupposes accurate guide data is available. TDS is notorious about bad data, and with bad info the TiVo will record TDS with a regular SP 5 times a freakin' day. I came up with my own workaround.

I set up 4 manual SP's for Comedy Central, 1am each day Tuesday - Friday, KAM = 1 for each. I made 4 SP's because a single Mon-Fri SP recorded stuff I didnt want. This also keeps each episode on my TiVo for a week before it gets auto deleted, in case something comes up. It gets reruns too, but that's not so bad.

You should see the rest of my SP list on both my DirecTiVos. das Monkey himself would appreciate its complexity and subtle genius :D