Anyone using Tivo? Got any tips? After months of harrassment by our friends, we're finally getting one, it comes on Monday

Supposidly my R15 satelite reciever has tivo built in (its a dvr so it makes somewat sense).

The one thing I don't like about tivo is that they report their stats to organizations responsible for ratings; which a lot of users who watch Stargate SG1 do I record my favorite show on friday nights as I'm generally out grocery shopping for the week... Well, "low ratings" was supposedly scifi's reason for canceling my favorite show on their 11th season...

Ofcoarse, they showed them, the users boycotted other shows and now NBC is ticked because of the ratings of Battlestar Galactica have gone down lol... Boycott baybee...

What they need to do is what they did for the last couple of years though, have it SciFriday with SG1, Atlantis, Dr Who, and Battlestar, it was their highest ratings for a friday and for all shows...

[/end geek]

Quite possibly - friday night television sucks on most channels - we could catch back up on the decent stuff from the other nights

yeh, the DirecTV DVR is awesome...

I gave Dish Network a chance to keep me as a customer, I called in and they agreed to give me A (singular) DVR to stay, however I need two DVR's as theres more than one tv in this house and they belong to more than one person. Upon asking how much a second DVR is they told me that they are unable to issue a customer more than one dvr...

So I changed to DirectTV, and I got two and more channels plus free stars/eoncore for the same cost of what i was paying... PLUS I can record on one channel and watch another; or i can record two channels

Nice, we got the dual tuner model, but not the HD model. We're trying it out now

HD model is like $699, its so not worth it...

How do you make it *not* record a particular show? It recorded 5 episodes of roseanne during the night

uhh, hit record *once* (see one red circle) vs hitting it twice (seeing three circles) I think... if it has 3 circles try hitting record again until it shows only one...

as far as that, yu may have turned on "episode recording"; i've only had the thing for a month andhave had major issues (I had to format the drive because of a bonkers upgrade)

And have you notice that you can't do a simple thing like friggen set an auto tune/reminder? lol

Some Tivos have a feature that will record shows that it thinks you might like. Apparently it thinks your a Roseanne fan You can disable that somewhere. I haven't had a tivo for awhile now so I'm not sure exactly where the option is.

I have it set to record shows we like, which includes some sitcoms (the office, etc.). It must think I want to record all sitcoms, no matter how bad. I like the feature that it records suggested shows, so we might watch something we'd miss normally, but I'd like to block some shows (like 'roseanne', 'futurama' (recorded that one twice , 'saved by the bell'). I may do some exploring on tivo's site.

I hate it, my "sugguested show" was "project myworld"; I'm sitting here all "if i wanted to watch a bunch of mindless twits I'd watch sienfeld"...

hey, i grew up on saved by the bell...

Exactly - with all that technology the most obvious miss right now is the ability to block particular shows from being recorded, ever.

Go into preferences and tell it to "only record first run" shows... that way it skips the second/third/etc showings of the same show which show up on other channels-- eg. Rosanne.

I've had Tivo for 8 years... on my fourth box now. I keep giving the old one away as a present to my kids. And, yes, I have the Series 3 HD with dual receiver. It really is nice, but as you noted, pricey.

Thanks Bill, I'll do that. That should cut out the sitcoms from the 70's, 80's, and 90's

hmm I can't find that setting, tho I know I've seen it in all my looking I see the recording > suggestion settings, but that just turns suggestions on or off.

Allen, I think you probably have the R15 like i do; if so, you don't have this setting, well you may but i think it's more hidden than being in an obvious location...

Where I do see it is for shows you choose to record and select season pass - you can choose to not record repeats - if I selected 'season pass' for Grey's Anatomy and specified only first-run/ no repeat recording it would only record the show on ABC Thursady nights and not the repeat on Friday or the older shows they play on the Lifetime channel.

I just set manual recordings... but for the life of me, i cna't figure out how to turn off manual recordings lol...

I have 3 TiVos, all are Series 2 - One is a DVD-writer and one is a Dual-Tuner. I won't buy a Series 3 until the price comes down considerably and until some of the missing features are supported (i.e. multiroom viewing, tivo to go and external SATA).

Allen, i found out how to stop re-occouring manual recordings lol...

I went into the todo list, went to my schedual, clicked ont he one and hit set, then chose dont set, and it got nerfed from my list lol...

Oh and BTW, if you ever get a botched updated (i've gotten some before, occours when you recieve an update when you're recording something) you have to reformat your system, which is easy as holding down and record down when the welcome screen comes up; you can tell when it's doen because your system will actually boot lol

Where's the 'to do' list? Online at tivo.com or on the tivo?

On the tivo.

ding ding lol... My tivo is built into my reciever (R15) so menu -> Settings -> Schedualer