Great News!

[krayzeekev]

- it is a result of using the OzTivo code, which never had preserving SPs as a goal and which is too hard to modify to achieve that goal.

Exactly. Although the oztivo code is about a guide system and an emulator. It has never been about converting "real" working tivos into "diy" tivos. It's a system designed to be spoken to by fresh TiVo's. Any server design would be like that because of the sheer complexity of the MFS model. Trying to match somebody else's without a complete dump of their db (which will be a different structure to yours) would be close to impossible.

Any effort to match SP's would be a separate exercise no matter how you did it. gcobb's idea of writing a script to look out for future showings and auto-create SP's would probably work but it feels like it's equivalent to just converting them all to Title Wishlists which somebody mentioned earlier.

It's also worth noting that, here in Australia, nobody had a real, working TiVo to "upgrade". (Almost?) Every TiVo here was bought as a refurbished S1 model, usually without a hard drive. You bought a hard drive, stuck it in a PC, burned the image onto it, stuck it in the TiVo and did a GS. No existing data could possibly exist since there was no TiVo service here in Oz.

As I said before, the only way I can see you preserving SP's properly would be to extract the entire MFS database out of a whole lot of existing TiVos (you need enough machines that you know you'll get as many series records as possible) and use that data to pre-populate the emulator database. Then, when your new data starts arriving, you'll start getting duplicates because spelling and stuff is bound to be different (we have some sport series that have up to 20 different names depending on where it's showing, which day, which time - seriously, I know when it's on, you don't need to call it "Saturday Night Football") and repair each of those as they happen. It'd be a huge exercise.


And, for fear of angering anybody - note that even after you connect to the new service, you won't be able to just recreate all your season passes, necessarily. Because if your TiVo has never seen a series, it won't have it in the MFS, so you won't be able to create an SP for it. Until it hits the schedules. There's a possibility that the TiVoWeb Backup/Restore SP process creates dummy records for those season passes so they'll get created on a restore. But the series being sent to you from the emulator will never match because the ID will be different!

I strongly suggest one of the following two options:
1) Convert your SP's to Title Wishlists
2) Start over. Spring Clean. Pretend your hard drive crashed.

[Pete77]

I still have a vague idea that I might take my backed up SPs and try to create a script which will watch for the programs to appear in the database and automatically create a new SP for them. However, this is a longer term project -- at the moment I am trying to help get the service just working as well as we can. So, if you have a lot of SPs I recommend taking a backup in case we ever find a way to do anything useful with it. But you cannot restore it with the new data.

The script that mikerr has just developed to convert all your existing SPs to Title Wishlists before running Guided Setup to the AltEPG seems like a good solution for all hacked Tivos with existing network access. Whilst channel specific SPs clearly have their advantages in some situations for any channel with a +1 variant a Wishlist on the whole now seems the preferable way to go to maximise the opportunity for Tivo's intelligent scheduling to avoid recording clashes despite having only one tuner by also scheduling recordings on the +1 variant.

However I'm not quite clear yet whether in addition to turning the SP in to a Wishlist Mike's script also automatically sets the Wishlist to Auto Record and keep the same number of episodes and until Space Needed or Keep Until I Delete etc settings as the Season Pass itself had. However as Title Wishlists is only reliant on simple text matches this does seem like a good way to go. The only issue will be for programs like The Simpsons where older series are being shown on several other channels apart from the channel on which you want to record showings. First Run Only may or may not be able to deal with this latter problem satisfactorily but usually also brings with it the risk of missing some recordings of the latest episodes of the series.

I can now see that a lot of thought clearly has gone in to how the AltEPG has been developed but having not been privy to any of those discussions until now it was hard to initially be confident that this had always been the case.

[Pete77]

krayzeekev,

After all the recent detailed explanations I think I now begin to see why conversion of Season Passes (either manual or automated by a script) to Title Wishlists is the only possible way to go with existing Season Passes despite my initial resistance to the idea of their loss when moving to the AltEPG.

However what thought do you have about large thumbs databases on our S1 UK Tivos (as in eight and a half years worth amounting to several thousand surviving one hard drive upgrade two and a half years in to the period) and leaving them in place when Guided Setup is run to the AltEPG rather than allowing them to be wiped out by a Clear and Delete Everything. Will the old thumbs associated with the old TMSIDs in any way be able to inform the new Suggestions or as the TMSIDs and the genre codes for the current programs will all be different are they in effect completely useless. And even if they are useless will they actually be doing any active harm other than filling up hard drive space?

[krayzeekev]

krayzeekev,
However what thought do you have about large thumbs databases on our S1 UK Tivos

I think there is an export for Thumbs as well but the same issues hamper restoring them to a TiVo on a different server.

Personally, I don't care for Thumbs. I don't think I've watched a suggestion on my TiVo ever. I don't have time to watch the things my SP's get. And I have a SciFi/Fantasy WL which I delete 95% of. Thumbs would be cool if they could override WL's but that'd be fairly ugly.