grrrrrrrrrrrr.

this entry was supposed to be about how i was all doing a little dance, singing a little song about how wonderful TiVo is for finding something that was on my wishlist and magically picking it up and recording a bunch of episodes for me, which i was, until i discovered…

Forum: Using the TiVo Service
Subject: Argh! Zero-length recorded programs for the past week and a half!

I tend to watch TV in widely-spaced blocks, so I’ll frequently leave my TiVo to do its thing for a week (or three) while I ignore it. Today I turned on the TV after letting it do its thing since the end of December, only to discover that everything it recorded since 1 January is apparently a blank file — it lists the program in the Now Playing list, but when I try to play it, it pops up the status bar at the bottom for about eight seconds, then prompts me if I’d like to delete it now or later, as though I’d just watched the program all the way to the end.

I tried rebooting the TiVo via the menus, thinking maybe it was confused somehow, and that didn’t help.

It’s obviously updating its program list fine, as it picked up a couple Wishlist things that weren’t on the schedule last month.

The weird bit was — I had it set to auto-record Suggestions, as sometimes it manages to come up with something fun to surprise me — and when I went paging down through all of my Season Pass-recorded, and Wishlist-recorded, programs, it had about 75 things — I only have a 40-hour DVR! And that’s on top of the probably 25 programs I had deliberately recorded. I thought, “wow, that’s really weird, I’m *sure* I don’t have enough space for all that.” Then I went on to try and play things I actually wanted to see, only to find that they were all BLANK.

The only thing I can think of was it filled up its disk but somehow didn’t want to actually delete anything, so it just kept on trying to record — creating these zero-length programs in my Now Playing list.

Now I just deleted all those Suggestions and the zero-length deliberately-recorded programs manually, one by one — ugh — and while I was doing that it started to record one of my Season Passes (and that seems to play back fine from the Now Playing screen), but is there anything I can do to prevent this happening again? I’m so hacked off at it screwing up over a whole week of programming. I mean, that’s the whole freakin’ point is that I don’t *have* to pay attention, it’ll just delete the old stuff and tape over it for me. And some of those were programs I really wanted. :(

Argh, argh, argh! AM. SO. HACKED. OFF. Grrrrrrr.

Does anyone have any ideas — apart from turning off auto-recording of Suggestions, which I just did, even though I like the Suggestions (SO NOT WORTH IT if this is my punishment for being curious!)? According to System Information, I’m running software version 5.3-01-2-540, on a Series2 TiVo. Are there any, I dunno, firmware updates I desperately need to apply or something? It says it’s dialing in fine.

dammit. at least i discovered it before i missed another new West Wing, but niqui so not pleased about this. i know, i know, it’s just television, but i watch about eight hours of it a month and i really fricking want those eight hours to be there when i want to watch them. especially considering the relative cost of a DVR+TiVo service to a VCR, which at least i would have no one but myself to blame for fucking up.

fucking computers!