It would be an understatement to say we love our Tivo. That said, does anyone have any advice on how to cope with the avalanche of good TV I now have access to? The movies I have on DVD are just starting to pile up on my coffee table because when I get home from work I have to watch PTI, a Futurama, ff through a Conan, look at Buffy and West Wing and Beavis reruns, watch South Park and Reno 911, catch up on Rescue Me and arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh

And all this during the SUMMER, before the new season starts. I don't know what I'm going to do when bball and fball season starts. Quit my job I guess? I know I don't HAVE to watch shows I've already seen, but it's just so tempting seeing them in the List.

Any tips on getting over this mental urge to watch everything on my Tivo?

You're hosed. Next thing you know, you will buy another DVR. I now have 2 Replays and a cable DVR - can record 4 things at once. Ironically, the DVD player doesn't get a whole lot of use and when it does - I usually watch TV-on-DVD (which makes up 80+% of my DVD purchasing now).

It's worse than crack. No point in fighting it.

I'm in a similar boat. There is always something to watch on my Tivo, whereas I have to go and look at my collection to figure out what I want to watch on DVD.

The new season shouldn't be too hard to keep up with. There aren't a ton of shows we are watching lately (after Angel's cancellation and having no interest in watching 24 any longer.)

I will say that eventually you will get through all the reruns of a given show and then you can remove it from your Season Pass list. This happened with MadTV and South Park for us.

One problem I have is the few shows I do watch are syndicated, roughly, 8000 times a day. One episode of The Shield per week, I can deal with that. Five episodes of Buffy and three episodes of West Wing EVERY DAY is getting tough.

Agreed. Roll with it and enjoy the ride!

Keep in mind though, if you're this addicted now, you should probably upgrade the hard drives before the fall season starts. One of my DTiVo's is upgraded to over 140 hours, but you can go higher than that. Well worth the money, believe me!

Set your TiVo to keep only 1 episode of each. Since they are reruns, why kill yourself trying to watch every episode aired each day?

Because they're all so gooooooooooooooooooooooooood .....

Assuming we are talking about shows with a serial format, limit yourself to watching one run of a syndicated show at a time. Once it is over, switch to another one.

I'm in the same boat here. No tivo, but I have sagetv on the pc. I've only had it for a couple months and I'm already backlogged by 85 hours or so. And thats with me watching stuff at least 3-4 hours a night. I've already dropped a few shows that are just on too many times - like that Comedy Central Presents show, within a couple weeks I was already behind by 10 episodes of it.

I feel your pain. My dish 508 has only 45-50 actual hours worth of space (not the 60 they say) and I have it almost maxed out constantly. I am able to keep enough free space to record the current day's stuff only by watching 4-6 hours of content each day. And I just signed up for the free 4 weeks of blockbuster online dvds, so I'm screwed when the fall season starts (in just a couple of weeks). I've already dumped my borderline shows, like The Jury, North Shore, and The Casino.

I just wish I could stop watching the two hours of nypd blue and the one (or more) hour of Law and Order each day. Keep in mind that I've watched both shows since the beginning, and many on repeats, so for nypd blue it's my third time around for most episodes, and for law and order, I've seen most eps at least four times already. It IS like crack. Or chocolate.

L&O is my crack cocaine - probably because of the suckiness of it currently, I long for the classic episodes. I've probably seen every episode from my favorite seasons (5-10) at least ten times each and I have my favorites saved on my Replays: I.D., Refuge, Aftershock, Under the Influence, the L.A. Trilogy (D-Girl/Turnaround/Showtime), the crossovers with Homicide, Ritual, Causa Mortis, Terminal, Monster, Nullification. It was getting pretty bad so over the summer, I've temporarily eliminated the TNT recordings).

I guess I'm lucky. I got my first TIVO Sunday. By Monday evening, it was already full of cool stuff I wanted to watch. Unfortunately it started to constantly reboot over and over again. I may have watched 10 minutes of recorded tv. Finally it wouldn't even let me do that. So, in the box it goes and I am now free of the TIVO....




.....at least until I get to Best Buy this weekend to exchange it for another one.

I have two directivos in my HT room and one in my living room. Can record six things at once, and it's just my wife & I.

I'm seriously debating putting one in the bedroom since I have one spot left on the multi switch and as soon as Comcast releases the HDTV DVR box in my area (should be soon), I'll have one of them too.


I agree - don't fight it... it's hopeless.

L&O is a hell of a drug.

I think you need to find more hours in the day or the Off switch. Either will solve your problems.

Either way I think this is quite funny coming from the guy who less than two months ago asked:



Personally I've learned to scale back my recordings to match my available time. Sometimes I fall behind and have to lay off the DVDs till I get caught up again.

Just give up sleep. What's the problem?

I just activated mine last week and I have a problem. I have satellite (voom), tivo recognized all the channels fine and dandy. Well the guys didn't install the correct card for me to get local channels so they had to come out last week to fix it. But I can't get my tivo to recognize local channels after having set it up to voom channels prior to thier fix. This needs to be solved before the fall season starts.

I have tried resetting the system and going to the guide setup. It won't let me change anything. Won't let me reset.

Any ideas?

Hard to directly address the problems without more information, but: standalone TiVo's cannot handle recording anything better than Standard Definition programs (meaning a 480i output). Since Voom is almost entirely High Def programming, that should be most of the problem? You say the TiVo "recognizes" the Voom channels, but are you recording on them?

Voom offers all the regular cable channels in standard-def. And locals, when not showing HD programming are in standard-def.

And yes, my tivo seems to be recording the Hi-def. I know it isn't supposed to but it is. I have the Toshiba DVD combo deal. The input is S-video, so their is some quality lost, but it still looks great, and is good enough for now just to be recording those programs and channels.

Isn't it just a 480i version of a 1080i or 720p picture?

One way to really tell: true HD takes up about 8-9g (or so) per hour. Standard is usually only 1g per hour. See how quickly it fills up on an HD-only channel.

Tivo had me at "hello" (tear)

You are not recording at HD quality. You are recording downconverted 480i video. There is no way to record HD on a non-HD Tivo. Such boxes generally don't even have the necessary inputs (i.e. component or DVI), much less the other hardware required to record HD. However, downconverted video will still look really good even when recorded by a non-HD DVR.

I have just gotten a PVR (no Tivo in Canada), and so far I love it. It is so much better than having to deal with VCRs, tapes, etc. I can definitely see that I am going to have way too much to watch though, but that is what weekends are for.

Mine is a HD TV PVR, but alas, I do not have a HDTV...yet. It's coming in the near future.

We are doing this we Olympics and NBC and CNBC. Luckily its kind of nice to compress 11 hours worth of Olympic coverage into about 4.

However, when the new season of shows roll around, I'm screwed.

Later guys... I gotta go watch the Iron Chef I TiVo'd last night.