MrBalky Heavy Industries

Back in the day, all you could do during the Olympic Games was watch the 4 hours of prime time coverage they had and hope the sport you were interested in was included. If you were satisfied with it, you must like track & field or swimming. Track cycling though? Hah!

Well this go round NBC has stepped up to the plate with massive amounts of coverage, including HD; hooray! But we discovered during the Tour de France that HD fills up the TiVo pretty quickly. Time to upgrade the shipping on the external drive (buy.com rocks BTW).

But now the problem is there’s so much content, I’m having trouble finding the what I’m genuinely interested in. I can’t find the day by day schedule that tells me at a glance what’s on each day. The big charts say “cycling” is on Tuesday, but not what it is. Road? Track? BMX? The cycling schedule doesn’t put it in a grid with all the other events on that day. And the “upcoming episodes” list on the TiVo just lumps it all together in one giant list, HD, SD, repeats, all in one giant wad of programs. Needle in haystack type stuff.

I want the day-by-day schedule broken down into a grid. I don’t care if it’s a gigantic Excel spreadsheet, I’m just sick of a million clicks to find what I want. In fact, what would be really really cool (I mean really) would be the schedule on NBC that links the event directly to the TiVo online scheduling for that event. I might pay money for that.

I’ve been a fanboy since 1999 when VStream gave them out for Christmas. TiVo is essential; I can’t imagine being without. Still, TiVo’s come down a few notches in the last 12 hours.

Our new HD TiVo arrived last night, and the initial setup went fine, just as expected. So now there are two TiVos in the room. They’ve thought of this, and the remote has a little 1-2 switch so commands to one don’t affect the other:

Fine. Cool. So I click around to the Settings menu and look for this configuration. Nothing anywhere, just how to set the remote up to control the TV. Sigh; off to the manual. Yes, there it is, and I have to do some convoluted operation going to the System Information display, and then enter an elaborate key sequence on the remote while shielding the TiVo from the remote. Sorry, I only have two hands.

Still, I made it through that, but it just doesn’t work. WTF? Well after poking at the buttons for a little while, I finally worked out how to do it, which was almost nothing at all like the manual said, and I’m not entirely sure how to get there again.

That hurdle cleared, I discovered they come with the Home Media Options turned off. Fine, I’ll go turn those on, but are they in Settings? Of course not. You have to navigate to the Music and Photos menu, select Media Options and press the thumbs up button 3 times then enter. Huh? Why can’t this just be on the Settings menu?

So eventually the old TiVo’s going to be displaced, so I want to transfer my recordings from that to the new one. But the TiVos don’t see each other at all. HMO is on, and I know this is possible; how do I do it? Nothing in the manual this time. Surfing up the TiVo site, it turns out the only way enable this functionality is via the TiVo website? Again, WTF?

I used to think TiVo had the usability and intuitive menus down, but now I’m not so sure. It really irks me to have to spend all of this time to hunt down these different places to configure the box, when one would expect them to all be one place.

I still think TiVo is essential, but some of the setup stuff truly sucks.