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TIVO for Media Research Questions HELP!
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Posted by: ProfessorP

Hi, I'm new to the forum. I am a professor of politics at a college in the mid-west and I'm seeking expert input from the TIVO community that will assist me in planning for a media research project.

Here is the project:
A small team of researchers is planning a study of the upcomming election in November. This study will be integrated with several media and politics and reasearch methods classes. Aspects of the project include focus groups, polls, and content analysis of local media coverage. We're particularly interested local news stories about election issues and want to record the news programs on the 4 main local broadcast stations (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX) twice daily (at 5 and 9 -- or 6 and 10 etc.). In the past we've done this with VHS video and then had students in our media and politics courses use video dubbing equipment to cull out the election related news and compile it for later human coding (students watch and identify themes, frames ect.). Its pretty tedious and can take up a lot of VHS tapes to record the initial broadcasts and a lot of time to cull out the relevant stories.

We were thinking about trying out TIVO technology to accomplish this but, as none of us has worked with TIVO, we're not sure what we can accomplish. I've been actively reading FAQs (especially a few hack FAQs) on networking TIVO machines, expanding drive space etc. but I still have some questions about TIVO programming ect.

If you've read this far, thanks for your interest, here are the questions:

1. If we dedicate a single TIVO machine to each channel and subscribe to the TIVO service, how likely is it we will 'never miss a show'?

One of the problems with recording local news shows is that on the weekend they tend to get delayed by sporting events on a semi-regular basis. In the past we've simply set the VCR to record for 2-3 times as long as the show and hoped that we caught it. We normally did, but this used up a lot more space on each tape limiting us to about one week of news shows per channel per VHS tape (over 20 weeks and 4 channels that makes for a lot of tapes).

Is TIVO's progamming smart enough to know when a show has been delayed by 'overtime'? Does it start automatically at the 'right' time? (I have no idea how it would be able to do this, but someone I know said it might!) Or would we still need to buffer the record time to be sure to catch the later starting program?

2. Once I've captured 80 or 100 hours of news shows on TIVO (video quality is not that important since we'll have students viewing this stuff ;) ) how should I go about editing it to get only the election related stories?

I imagine i could simply play the video back to a vcr and use pause and FF to search through and record the selections (amazingly we found on average only about 2 minutes of election coverage/ 30 min show!). However, this approach doesn't seem very elegant or to make great use of TIVO's potential.

We'd really like to be able to edit the shows, cull out and compile the election stories and burn these as Mpeg clips on to CDRs or data DVDs that the students could watch on their PCs!

Can video be downloaded from TIVO machines in digital format and edited on a Desktop PC or MAC? I read a few web-pages that discussed this process (converting ty files etc.) They are pretty technical and were focused on the series 1 machines. Does the Broadband compatibility of the Series 2 make telnet and downloading easier? We have a few Macs around that we could network to the TIVOs for creating video compliations to burn to ROM media. Any idea how possible, technically challenging and labor intensive this would be? I would have our college's ITS support for this (there are some REALLY smart Linux guys on staff).

[BTW We would love to have, but can't afford to buy, 4 DVR to DVD burner machines (athough I understand its not possible to burn parts of shows to DVD so we'd have to record the whole program and probably get one week of news/DVD but they are a lot nicer than VHS!). ] Maybe I should write a nice letter to the manufacturer begging for social science support? ;) Anyone have any connections to Pioneer?

Anyway, any input, ideas, encouraging experiences from the TIVO community would be welcome. We're planning to start coverage right after the Democratic Convention in July so we'll soon have to decide whether to dust off our VCRs again or whether we can leap to digital!

Thanks for you time and responses.

Posted by: Joey P

As far as making sure you catch the shows, TiVo generally won't miss the shows you want (especially in this case since it will most likely be only one season pass on the TiVo, so you won't have to mess around with prioritzing(sp?). Also, to be sure you catch it, you can pad the show to record extra time on both ends. OR, to be really sure, set up manual recordings to whatever times you want (ie if you want the 5 and 6 o'clock news, you could set it to record 4-8), but since things can be shifted at the last minute, sports can run long, presidential election coverage could pre-empt other things, it's always best to have someone keep an eye on it to be sure. As for editing, you could do what you said about copying to a VCR and working the pause and FF buttons, or you could copy to another TiVo and do it that way. (It might be more difficult though, I think you would have to get what you want into the live buffer and then record that). Actually now that I think about it, I have another idea. I was going to suggest for the next step to install a video capture card in a computer, stream the (edited) shows you want into the computer and burn that to a DVD. But it may be easier to stream everything you record into a computer and just edit it on the computer, I'd imagine most video capture programs will give you the ability to cut and paste. (hmm, hope this makes some sense, it's 1:00 in the morning and I'm quite tired)

Posted by: ZeoTiVo

the three ways I see to go here are -
1.
get cheap series 1 tivos off of Ebay or somehwere - hack them and upgrade the hard drive - then you can pull video off to a PC and edit away and burn to DVD or record to tape or whatever. That is as far as can be said on this point in this forum - video extraction talk is not allowed here. do a agoogle search - plenty of info out there. Books on Amazon etc..

The nice thing with this is that you will have the news shows organized by name, etc already on an easy to use interface. The down side is the extra work of setting up the TiVos. PS - you can always set a manual recording on Tivo for any time period and length.

2. get the series 1 or series 2 TiVos record the shows and then have a student watch them in real time , via the save to VCR method, he has a remote on teh VCR and pasues recording when non-relevant info is shown and then starts recording when relevant info is shown. Very easy to do (I do this when I make long tapes of kid shows for when we travel)
Also you can hook up a 300$ standalone DVD recorder and get the same kind of editing, I think.
again easy to use interface - even your 101 eager beavers could work it - and shows stored by name.

3. get a PC and TV record card or more - research the software out there - Myth, beyond Tv etc.. , set it all up and do the recordings. You still will have the shows stored by name and organized but you will need to a lot more manual work to make it so and there will be considerablty more time spent tweaking.troubleshooting the PC setups vs a TiVO.