Once upon a time nevans52 shaped the electrons to say... > Our kids bought us a tivo for Christmas and there are a couple of
Well, that's a nice gift. :-) > 1) can you record just a program without its commercials? Somehow I > thought that was a tivo feature, but have not been able to find how to > do it. No, there is no DVR that I know of that records a show but not the commercials. That would be risky as there is no 100% reliable commercial detection system, so it could accidentally miss some of the show if it thought it was a commercial, or missed the end of the commercial break. There have been some DVRs that skip the commercials automatically on playback. ReplayTV used to have that feature in some of their models, but after being sued over it they dropped it from their final product. And some PC-based DVR software has the ability. On TiVo you have two options - the first is just to use fast-forward to zip through the ads. The second is to use the 30-second skip feature to jump through them in 30-second hops. See: http://www.tivolovers.com/getting-started-with-tivo/ > 2) why would our tivo want to compulsively record programs that we > don't watch, don't request, and do not want? It seems to be especially That's TiVo Suggestions - see the manual for all the details. It records things based on your ratings and recording habits. When you first get the unit it has very little history to go by, so it can swing wildly for a while. The more shows you rate (thumbs up or thumbs down) and record the more data it has to work with, and the better it should get at finding programs you might be interested in. > jordan, which we never watch. Is there a setting somewhere that turns > off the unwanted recording schedule? It seems to want to do these Yes - but I encourage you not to turn it off. It doesn't do any harm. The TiVo will never record a Suggestion instead of a program you requested, and Suggestions are always deleted *first*, no matter what, so they'll never cause one of your recordings to be deleted. You can safely ignore them and they won't interfere. Also, if you've used the TiVo remote within the past 30 minutes watching Live TV, it won't record a Suggestion. As long as there is some remote activity it resets tha 30 minute timer so it won't interrupte Live TV viewing. And the Suggestions offer a way to monitor how much free space you have left. As long as you have some Suggestions recorded you know the drive isn't full of your recordings and they aren't in danger of being deleted. If you turn on Groups in the Now Playing List (hit '2') all the Suggestions get lumped into one group at the bottom of the list, out of the way. And you never know - over time it can get quite good at figuring out what you like, and it can find programs you would have otherwise missed. -MZ -- megazone-at-megazone.org http://www.MegaZone.org/ Gweep, Geek, Human, me. http://www.TiVoLovers.com/ http://www.Eyrie-Productions.com/ -><- Hail Eris "A little nonsense now and then, is relished by the wisest men" 508-852-2171
