Registered: May 2002
Location: Boston, MA
Posts: 547

Weird guide data change

Last night I noticed that TiVo was recording a suggestion. I turned on live TV to see what it was. The display data indicated it was the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Welcome to the Hellmouth." Since this is the pilot, I decided I would save it, and changed the "save until..." date. When I went in to watch the recording, it said the episode title was "The Harvest," the second episode in the series. But it's definitely the first half of the 2-part pilot, not the second.

This is not a problem, but I'm confused. How could the guide data change between the live program and the recorded one? Can someone else explain this?

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Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Seattle, WA
Posts: 1186

Sure.

The blue bar at the top of the TV shows you what is on the screen right now. So if your buffer was showing what was on 20 minutes ago, the bar will show what was on 20 minutes ago, not what is being recorded right now.

So, if your buffer is set 20 minutes behind, and the record light is on, if you go to "live TV" the blue bar will show the show from 20 minutes ago (Hellmouth in this case) but the red light is indicating something truly Live is being recorded (Harvest). This seems to make a lot of sense in this case because they probably aired those two episodes together.

This is the same issue where some people suddenly think they have two tuners. The buffer is your friend but can make things confusing.

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Registered: Jan 2002
Location: Suburban Philadelphia
Posts: 785

Actually, I don't think it's the buffer at all. FX had originally scheduled "Welcome to the Hellmouth" on Tuesday, and "The Harvest" on Wednesday, but later changed that to running the episodes one day later. The guide data on my Tivo was accurate, (although it wasn't fixed until Monday). It's at least possible that your data had either had an indexing problem or wasn't loaded into the DB correctly. If you look through the Help Center, you will find from time to time people describe not being able to find programs in "Search by Title", although it can be found in the Live Guide, and I think this is related.
(FX was running them separately this week, as two one hour segments, which is why I don't think the buffer is involved.)

Keith

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Registered: Sep 2001
Location: Binghamton, NY
Posts: 12718

I have seen this happen when the SP has captured the description and then the description is updated later. The old description may stay with the recording unless you reenter the SP before the recording occurs.

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Registered: May 2002
Location: Boston, MA
Posts: 547

Thanks, all.

You're right, rickertk -- it wasn't the buffer; I know this because I was watching live TV caught up to real time and I checked the recording to make sure it was the same as what I had seen. (Also FX doesn't show the episodes back to back.) So your explanation makes sense. Glad to know that I'm not losing my mind (and more important, that my TiVo's not losing its mind!)

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