TiVo Community Forums Archives - Two things -TV Grid and Recycle Bin

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Two things -TV Grid and Recycle Bin
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Posted by: mharbold

Hi. My first suggestion is having a guide that looks more like a TV guide grid. Drives me nuts using the Tivo guide because I don't get a quick look at what's on all of the channels. I want to see a grid, just like the ones in the TV guide or the TV book that comes in the Sunday paper. Any one else out there like that idea?

This next suggestion must have been aired before, but I didn't see it in the list of suggestions that have been beat to death. I think it would be GREAT to have a recycle bin for deleted shows. Lets say you delete something by accident, which I often do. It goes into the recycle bin and you have, lets say, 24 hours to undo the delete, until it gets permanently deleted. Also, all of the shows that get deleted automatically - they also get put in the recycle bin. Let's say that they got deleted to make room for upcoming shows - a message should appear on the screen informing you that you have shows in your recycle bin that will be deleted within a certain time frame if you don't save them. Some people might say that it wouldn't work - let's say you're not home and you didn't see the message before it deleted the show - well, all I have to say is that there would be a lot more shows that you were able to retrieve that would have been otherwise lost, and that is worth it right there. Any thoughts???

Posted by: Hunter Green

DISH Network has the grid-like guide, and I, for one, much prefer TiVo's. But it might be nice to have both available.

Posted by: Breacagan

quote:
Originally posted by mharbold
Hi. My first suggestion is having a guide that looks more like a TV guide grid. Drives me nuts using the Tivo guide because I don't get a quick look at what's on all of the channels. I want to see a grid, just like the ones in the TV guide or the TV book that comes in the Sunday paper. Any one else out there like that idea?

Gemstar liked it so much, they patented it, believe it or not. It's just fortunate that there was prior art on a method for creating rectangles on a display terminal, or they'd also sue companies for every rectangle ever drawn.

TiVo's live guide is carefully designed not to infringe upon Gemstar's patents, not that such careful design would prevent Gemstar from suing somebody. It's what they do.

Posted by: mharbold

You've got to be kidding!! Never heard of GemStar. Who are they?

Posted by: Breacagan

Gemstar-TV Guide International: What We Do

The Technology and Licensing sector (read: "Technology" in quotation marks) is core to their business:

quote:
This sector also protects the Company's developments, products, services and technology via a variety of legal means including but not limited to seeking patent protection internationally and domestically.

They are currently a division of News Corp., which recently took a multi-billion-dollar write-down as a result of paying too much for Gemstar.

Posted by: rkcarter

I like your Recycle Bin idea... the one conflict I can see is with Suggestions. If Suggestions didn't exist, one could treat recycle bin shows the same way, just keep one until the space is needed, delete them oldest-first then. With Suggestions, TiVo's designers, or maybe you, would have to decide -- "keep only 24 hours", "keep until a Suggestion needs the room," "keep and Suggestions don't record if there's room," things like that.

Posted by: mharbold

Speaking of suggestions... I have never used the suggestions - I have them turned off. I run out of room without having suggestions automaticaly record, and all of the suggestions that are showing up on the list are definitely not shows I'd want to watch. Is there a way to delete all of the suggestions and start over? And how do you get the suggestions to conform with your tastes? Thanks.

Posted by: mikey

Remember that the disk space is still used by a file in the recycle bin. I'd rather have the disk space than the recycle bin. I hate the extra steps it takes to empty the damn thing on Windows.

Posted by: rkcarter

quote:
Originally posted by mikey
Remember that the disk space is still used by a file in the recycle bin. I'd rather have the disk space than the recycle bin. I hate the extra steps it takes to empty the damn thing on Windows.

I gotta agree... if this is implemented I want it to be as transparent as are "Suggestions" Of course, if it's there and turned on by default, there may never *be* any more Suggestions recorded (assuming it keeps deleted things until they're needed).

Because of that, I'm starting to come around to the idea of logic like:

- Keep Deleted (recycle bin) at least 24 hours unless space is needed.
- Before the 24 hours, don't use the disk space for Suggestions.
- After 24 hours, use it for Suggestions.

... but I guess that starts to get complicated.

- Rick

Posted by: Hunter Green

You don't have to empty the recycle bin on Windows and you wouldn't have to on TiVo if they had one. In Windows, you just say how much space to dedicate to it, and when it gets bigger than that, it throws away the oldest stuff. Emptying it just defeats the purpose and wastes effort (unless you have a reason to -- like the stuff in it is incriminating). If TiVo had a recycle bin, it'd just be like suggestions; it'd only be a different kind of "available space" (probably claimed before suggestions when space is needed).

Posted by: mharbold

At the very least, wouldn't it be nice to have a 5 minute window to catch shows that you deleted in error????

Posted by: Ollie

What I would suggest is that when you delete a show it stays on the "Now Playing" list but changes to a new "Deleted" category (the icon could be a little trash can), which goes below all the suggestions. Then as long as there's still space available for new recordings, it still wouldn't be deleted, but if space was needed, it would be deleted before suggestions. Of course there's a chance with this that it would be deleted straight away if there happened to be a new recording just about to start which needed the space, but hey, you did delete it...

The other possibility would be to give the option of putting deleted shows above suggestions (but below all undeleted shows) or below suggestions.

Posted by: mikey

If recycle bin is implemented, please give me an option to disable it.

Posted by: rkcarter

The more I think about it, the more I'd like an even simpler -- don't mess with any of the other logic, don't take any special care to keep the file with the just-deleted show (except maybe to not write to that area of the disk again for a while -- round-robin, but maybe not even that).

For me, the most useful wouldn't be 24 hours later, it would be 10 seconds later when I had a change of heart and said "y'know, I might really want to see that after all."

Also, I ran into a bug one time -- haven't seen it since -- where everything in the shows list was off-by-one. I deleted one important thing before I caught it. I'd go to delete, say "Good Eats" by pressing CLEAR and it the next screen said "The West Wing" or whatever it was that I wanted to keep, but my fingers were already on autopilot, my brain didn't tell me what my eyes had seen til it was too late. I figured I just missed, but I went into the next thing down, and it was also one off.

That was maybe two weeks ago -- I've never seen it before or since.

But an undelete at that moment would've been cool.

Posted by: HTH

I don't like grids anyway. They demand the content conform to the grid's dimensions, which results in abbreviated content, in order to display what, only 90 minutes of data at a time on less than a half a dozen channels at once on the screen? Not what I'd consider good usage of screen real estate.

And in print, they can never handle transitions from DST gracefully. They just can't handle there being an extra hour of programming for one evening in the Fall.

A pity TMS and their sources still compose their data with a grid mindset rather than using UTC year 'round and leaving the rendering up to the displayer. TiVo's rendering would be much better if the data it worked from was more raw.

Posted by: bobsoron

Actually, I've never liked grids -- you just don't see that much information. I think my RCN grid (which I haven't looked at in more than a year) shows me five or six channels at a time, 90 minutes of each. Tivo shows me a dozen channels or so of what's on right now, along with what's on for the next few hours of the currently highlighted channel. It's a really clever way to display the information -- although, as a couple of threads on Suggestion Avenue here have pointed out, they could enhance it to display even more info.

Posted by: rkcarter

quote:
Originally posted by HTH ...
A pity TMS and their sources still compose their data with a grid mindset rather than using UTC year 'round and leaving the rendering up to the displayer. TiVo's rendering would be much better if the data it worked from was more raw.

It's rather amusing -- my sweetheart lives in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. Most of Indiana doesn't "celebrate" Daylight Savings Time, so half the year off we're an hour off (both Eastern, but she's EST all year where I'm EST half-year and EDT half-year). This year the local stations all decided they should give Hoosiers their shows at their intended local times, so they hold them back an hour.

But it's just jammed things up confusingly -- Carolyn has to remember if the show is local or cable, so does "9:00" really mean 9:00, or does it mean 8:00?

The good news is that if there's something good on network programming, I can call her during a commercial and she can watch it (or TiVo it for the weekend). The bad news is that if she does watch a show that goes from 10-11 for me, it ends at *yawn* 11 for her (midnight for me) and messes with our usual good-night 11pmish phone call.

Posted by: rkcarter

Oh yeah, and I've already figured out that if she's still in Indiana on her birthday (October) she's gettin' a TiVo. Actually if she's here she'll probably get one anyway... don't want all those HGTV gardening shows screwing up my suspense thriller/science fiction Thumbs data....