Back in simpler times when I was living in Alaska. my TiVo setup was pretty simple. The only signal I had was OTA from an antenna on my roof, and all I received was four channels (well, five actually, but I told TiVo to ignore the religious channel). Wish lists and season passes were simple.

Now I'm in the big world, and my cable hookup is feeding something in excess of 400 channels into the house. It's a bit overwhelming. In Alaska, I set up a wish list for Science/Nature programs, and I would get Nova and Scientific American Frontiers off of NPR, once in a while a National Geographic special. Maybe five or six programs a month from that wish list. Now I get thirty or forty of them in a two day period. So, that doesn't work.

I found out that TiVo at long last supports exclusions in keyword searches, but I can't make it work. Supposedly if you preface the keyword with a thumbs-up (or thumbs-down, either will work) it puts a minus sign in front of the keyword and makes it an exclusion word rather than a required word. This doesn't seem to work for me, no minus sign appears. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong? How deep into the program description do keyword searches go? For my exclusion I need to search past the title and the program description, right down to the boilerplate of what kind of program it is. Specifically, I need to look for "Auto racing, sports non-event" and key on "sports non" as an exclusion so I don't end up recording the NASCAR shopping channel and the pre-race show etc.

Is there any place I can go that will give me a list of all the channels I receive and a brief description of what the channel is about? That way I can exclude about 350 of the 400 channels I receive as being not worth my interest, like the religious channels, and the shopping channels, and the cooking channels, and the cartoon channels, etc.

I am not happy with the picture quality I am getting. I am running a Gen-II TiVo (single tuner with integrated DVD burner) into a Sharp Aquos 32" LCD LC-C3242U High Definition set, and the picture quality is so poor that I can't even read the numbers on the race cars. (Update: this was with TiVo at lowest quality. At highest or next-to-highest quality it is acceptable, but not great.) I think the root of my picture quality difficulties lies with the TV set, not the TiVo. There is little if any difference in picture quality if I run the signal directly from the cable box into the TV set, bypassing the TiVo.

My setup is like this: Cable comes into the house and into a splitter, one leg going to the Motorola Cable Box, the other leg to a cable modem and router for internet and VOIP phone service.

The Motorola cable box sends signal to the TiVo, through S-Video and regular audio connections. The TiVo sends the signal to Input 1 on the TV set as component video. (The TiVo doesn't have component input, just output.) When I select Input 1 on the TV set, it flashes a brief message that it is running at 480P resolution. Is this normal for my setup? I have no idea what sort of resolutions TV sets use, but 480 seems low compared to my LCD computer monitor which is running 1680 x 1050. Or is this an apples and oranges comparison?

I do receive some HD channels and they don't look any different from the regular channels. Question: If TiVo is recording an HD program, is it using more disk space than a regular program, or is the space it takes dictated strictly by the quality level set for the recording?

As you can tell, I am a complete newbie when it comes to home theater (well, Home Theater is a bit of an overstatement here -- I have a cable box, a TiVo and a 32 inch TV set) and any help or advice will be appreciated.

tanstaafl.

Series 2 Tivos aren't HD Tivos, so it's not storing it in HD and you wouldn't be seeing it in HD either. Series 3 Tivos are HD (that includes the Series 3, the TivoHD, and the TivoHD XL).

These days, frankly, you're best-off getting a TivoHD and asking your cable company to send a guy out with cablecards. You might have to push a little but they should be required to give them to you. I think that would solve a lot of your problems.

Given the problems I've had with my CableCards, I don't know that Doug would want that headache.

That said, I imagine the problem might be in all the processing that's going on. Cable to S-Video to MPEG to component to LCD is quite a few steps.

The first thing I would do is plug the cable box directly into the TV and see what that looks like. First do S-Video and then try anything else it might have, especially HDMI.

Do the TiVo menus look okay or are they low quality, too?

I don't think those categories show up as keywords. I'm not in front of my TiVo right now, but can't you set up a wishlist search and select the subcategory "event" (or whatever the opposite of non-event is)? (I don't watch sports, so I'm not familiar with the categories available for it.)


"Standard" TV — that is, NTSC: what we've all been watching in the US for fifty years — is effectively 480i ("i" meaning "interlaced" and "p" meaning "progressive"), which is 720×480×30Hz. Digital TV supports several resolutions up to (as of now) 1080p, or 1920×1080×30Hz. But NTSC is the highest resolution that you can transmit over an S-Video cable.

480p sounds right for a component source (Tivo) that is non HD. (720x)480p is also the resolution of DVDs. NTSC resolutions were lower, but tend to get bumped up to at least 480i

HD resolutions are 1280x720p, 1920x1080i and 1920x1080p, though your TV will only show one of these if it is being fed an HD or upscaled signal.

(gah, distracted by a coworker, and Bitt beat me to it)

HaHA! I Win!

The root of your picture quality difficulty might lie with the inherent suckitude of standard-def digital broadcasting.

If I recall correctly, back in Alaska, you were recording analog over-the-air broadcasts. Now you're on a digital cable service where every channel is data compressed. (And the Tivo is data compressing even more on top of that.)

Rant: Once upon a time, digital picture meant better quality. Until the digital broadcasters (cable, satellite) discovered that they got more subscribers if they could offer more channels. Subscribers didn't care about picture quality as much as channel selection. To cram more channels onto the same digital carrier, they have to increase the amount of data compression. In addition to obvious MPEG blockiness, increased data compression causes fuzzier pictures and flatter, smearier colors.

The orginal idea of high definition TV was to elevate television to a new level of amazing picture quality. At first, it truly was amazing. Now? The HD channels are the only ones where the picture quality is anywhere near as good as it was back in the days of analog broadcasting. And even that's starting to slip.

Sigh.

BTDT



Menus are bright and crisp.

tanstaafl.

Did you have the same TV in Alaska, or an older non HDTV unit?

Feeding a standard def signal into an HDTV tends to look bad in any case, as there isn't much data to work with to fill the higher resolution screen. Add onto that the point Tony brought up of cable companies cramming as many channels as possible down the pipe, and it gets worse.

Lack of a good HD alternative when Voom went under was one of my reasons I gave up on dealing with any subscription TV service. Buying shows off iTunes, or on DVD/BluRay has resulted in a much higher quality viewing environment.

Good point. Although I'd modify that to say "most cases" instead of "any case".

I've seen some HDTVs that do a great job of scaling-up standard def pictures, but not many. Most of the time, an HDTV will simply stretch a standard def picture to fill the screen, without any additional image processing, which causes yet more fuzziness.

Doug's description seemed like it was more than just bad upscaling, though.

Unfortunately, no. The furthest down the subcategories go is "Sports-->Auto Racing". What I am looking at and trying to catch with key words isn't the program title nor the program description. It's the boilerplate stuff down at the bottom that is the only real distinguishing feature. A little testing shows that the key word search does not address that information. See the attached pictures for what I mean. The "non-event" show is a discussion panel about a 30 year old race with video clips thrown in.

The third picture is just a sample to show how bad the picture is when recorded at lowest TiVo quality. It is much better at higher quality levels (no surprise) but even at highest quality it is no better than my old OTA signal at lowest record quality in Alaska. I think Tony has it right a couple of posts before this one.



Since my TiVo is not an HD unit, then NTSC is as good as it gets, right?

tanstaafl.

The only problem with that idea is that SWMBO bought this TiVo used at a really good price because it has a lifetime TiVo subscription with it and that's worth a fair chunk of change, plus a new TiVo would be another few hundred dollars.

I've never been that big a fan of the whole HD experience in any case. The kind of TV I watch really wouldn't be improved much by High Definition.

tanstaafl.

Yet your examples are for the Daytona 500.

I really do notice a huge improvement in watching auto racing in HD. I'm able to actually see a car's number, rather than just a red car with some white on the hood. That is the biggest benefit as far as racing goes that I have seen.

(And go 24!)

If you're happy, then stay that way!

But I used to think the same (HD wouldn't matter),
and I was wrong. The difference is similar to going
from an old CRT monitor to a nice crisp LCD display.
DTV is wayyy easier on the eyes, whether SD or HD.

Cheers

I just got off the phone with TiVo's technical support (took about 40 seconds to get through the menus, had to wait another 15 seconds before talking to a real person!) and the exclusion keyword thing does work. I was just doing it wrong. Surprisingly for TiVo, the proper way to do it was unintuitive, at least to me. You don't use the thumbs button while you're entering the key word. You enter the keyword, then instead of selecting the "Done" button, you right-arrow out of it which takes you to the screen that lets you add another key word and has the dialog about how you can make the keyword an exclusion rather than inclusion. At that point you can arrow down and highlight the keyword you just put in, and then you can use the thumbs button on the remote to make it an exclusion. This is a feature that TiVo has needed for years, and if it's been there all this time and I just didn't know about it.... aaarrrggh!

tanstaafl.

That third picture has a very specific problem to it that isn't related to data compression. It has an interlacing issue. It appears to only be showing one of the two interlaced fields in the frame. It has its lines doubled-up, similar to the problem pictured in the section titled "Single-Field Interpolation" here.

It's possible that it's simply an artifact of the thing being in "pause" mode. Sometimes a "paused" picture does that. If so, that's normal. But if your regular day-to-day viewing of a TV show always looks exactly like that picture, then you really need to get it fixed. If that's the case, say so, and we can discuss possible causes and solutions for it.

Other than that, yeah, it looks like a typical overcompressed digital broadcast to me: Fuzzy. Muted color palette. Color channel is smeared.

No, only if I record it on TiVo at TiVo's lowest ("EP") setting. At the two highest quality levels the picture is acceptable, but not as good as I had OTA in Alaska.

tanstaafl.

Remember that your TiVo is lossily reencoding that video, which has already probably been lossily reencoded by your cable company. Even when you're watching it "live". The same caveats that apply to mp3s also apply to video.

Hah! Talk about an understatement. I just now actually counted the shows it wanted to record (obviously it can't get all of them) and there are 135 of them just in the next 60 hours. I guess that means on average at any given minute of the day there are at least two Science/Nature programs. I guess my option here is to look through, pick out the few that I actually want, and then set up channel-specific season passes rather than an all-encompassing wish list.

tanstaafl.

Response to this one got overlooked in the original post, so I'll bump it a bit. I receive the Comcast Mountain View Extended Channel package.

Do I have to watch each channel for a minute or two to see what it is about? That would be about a 10 hour job...

tanstaafl.

Does this help?

You could try going to Zap2it.com, selecting TV Listings at the top right, then entering your zip. I found that going directly to Comcast to get my channel lineup they are extremely inaccurate. (out of date)

Unfortunately, not very much. I have no way to cross-reference the listings there with the information I have. For instance, what channel is "16 KKPX" on my TV set? Without actually going and looking at it, I have no way to know. Similarly, "The Bloomberg Channel" on your list may well be on my TV, but it will be identified as "WKRP" or something that doesn't relate.

tanstaafl.

Yeah, Zap2it might be useful. It doesn't give a description of what the channel is about (i.e., Sports, Religion, Shopping, Food, Cartoon, etc.) but the names of the programs scheduled can give some idea. I'll use it to prepare a list of channel numbers for TiVo to ignore, that will help quite a bit.

tanstaafl.

Got it!

First I set up a wish list for just Sports-->Auto Racing, with title keyword "NASCAR". Then I went to "View upcoming programs" and made a list of keywords that defined what I didn't want. In this case, it was "practice", "qualifying", "preseason", "nascar now", "countdown", and "angels". Then I edited the wish list and added those words as exclusions, and deleted the NASCAR title keyword so it was just auto racing. Ran "View upcoming..." again, found I had to exclude a few items from the Title keyword ("3 Wide" and "Raceline") and voila! A clean To-Do list with only the auto racing events I want in it.

Drag Racing and Motorcycle Racing (I am a fan of any mechanized sport) will be easy, just straight wish lists. It's only the NASCAR listing that has all the extraneous stuff.

tanstaafl.