TiVo added a new enhancement this week (or at least it showed up on my TiVo, it might not be on yours yet but it should download it soon) called “Overlap Protection”. Now it can help with goofy network show times, ome shows are scheduled from 9:00 to 10:01 or something similarly goofy, so now the 10 o’clock show previously wouldn’t record it due to the overlap (or depending on your “priority” settings, it might not record the other one). The enhancement is now it won’t skip the second show, it’ll just give priority to the hight priority show and chop the few minutes from the lower priority show! Yeah!
You’ve been able to “pad” a show for a while now, which means you take a show that’s on from 8-8:30 and you know it always runs a little late so you pad two minutes at the end. Now it records from 8-8:32 (let’s assume it’s a season pass). So I’m assuming it protects and gets most of the show. We’ll have to see.
I did see that manual individual recordings take priority.
What’s the limit though? If it’s an hour overlap into a two hour show, does it still tape half of the two hour show? I now see there’s a five minute limit in this overlap. It’s too bad that’s not adjustable (5/10/15/30/60/120), I’d probably set it for ten or fifteen minutes. I’d only use the hour option around the olympics or something like that where it’s okay to miss the an hour of a four or six hour show.
This is only for the series 2 recorders (the ones with USB ports on the back) but not DirecTiVo. If you don’t have 7.2.1 you can ask to get on the request list and they’ll bump you to the head of the line. It’s not that much of an upgrade but just in case you’re running a much older version (I don’t know what other versions are still out there) you might want to request it.
[This post has been modified quite a bit from when I posted it earlier today]
Overlapping programs is chronically bad in Australia. It used to be that sometimes the late night stuff would finish a little late, so you’d add ten minutes to the end of a movie. But it’s gotten *really* bad in prime time now too. Like now. It’s 7:40pm, the prime time show was meant to finish at 7:30pm, and it only *just* finished. Now when I set videos I tape 10-15 minutes overtime. Fortunately I don’t need to tape two shows at once too often, and *all* channels run badly overtime anyway :)