Reclaiming more disc space and minor tweaks

[johalareewi]

If others also find a clean signal dramatically improves mode 0 and reduces flickering then perhaps this post should be moved to its own thread where it can be found easily. When the mode 0 hack was first discovered and the flickering at the bottom of the screen was a hot topic I don't remember seeing anyone mention anywhere that the signal quality made a big difference to flickering symptoms and mode 0 quality. Instead, there was a lot of talk about it being the luck of the drawer as to whether you owned a TiVo that just happened to handle mode 0 with minimal flickering. I now suspect that the real reason for different people's experiences was likely to have been the quality of the signal they were feeding TiVo.

Interestingly, when electronically copying mode0 recordings off of Tivo to a PC for further processing (not that we did that ), it was discovered that the mode0 flashes were not in the files copied off of Tivo. This suggested that the flashes were caused by the tivo playback process and not the tivo recording process.

[DX30]

...there was a lot of talk about it being the luck of the drawer as to whether you owned a TiVo that just happened to handle mode 0 with minimal flickering. I now suspect that the real reason for different people's experiences was likely to have been the quality of the signal they were feeding TiVo.

While I would agree signal quality does play a major part I don't think it is the only factor. I've used two TiVo's with the same stb and one suffered badly from mode 0 flashes and one didn't. The stb, dish and cables all stayed the same, only the TiVo was swapped.

[tivofantastic]

Interesting comments - so seemingly both signal quality and the particular TiVo are both factors.

I am sure I have read a comment on Tivocommunity or elsewhere suggesting that the older TiVos perform better though this was probably pure hypothesis.

It would be interesting if it were possible to conduct some sort of survey via TiVo messaging or the TiVo registration page so that source type (Aerial/SCART) versus level of flickering (no flickering/several flickers per minute/flickering every few seconds) could be be assessed against TiVo serial number. I believe the middle section of the serial number (a hexidecimal number between 601E and 6023 I think) gives an indication of the age of your TiVo.

One way would be to ask people via TiVo messaging if they would mind completing a "mode 0 flicker" survey at some AltEPG url - this would hopefully elicit a good response. Alternatively I guess it might be possible to construct a survey using the poll features of phpBB (this forum software)?

[tivofantastic]

mode 0 flicker discussions have started in two threads now. In the interests of keeping the discussion in one place I suggest posting future replies to the other thread at http://www.tivoland.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1089 as it has a more on-topic subject title.

[mrtickle]

Thanks the for the additional images - now installed! I have stuck with the v6 bar as it is perfectly good enough and appears to be the proper height (as opposed to the v5 bar which look like it may be 1 pixel too short).

Since you mentioned the WaitLonger-256.3.png text looked poor, I produced another one quickly by combining the clock from your image with the text from the original image (see attached). On my TV the clock still doesn't look exactly round but I am guessing it must be rounder than it was before I don't recollect how squashed the original clock was in this image and can't say it ever particularly bothered me - which begs the question why I am bothering now, but heh, why not. Thanks again.

I now have an LCD for the first time, and a lot of the images are now leaping out at me and look really terrible! Particularly the ReplayPauseRecord images. So I'm going to revisit the whole lot, now that I have an incentive