Enough Is Just Right, Thanks!

[ByTheCringe]

AltEPG Team: I am in awe of your achievements, as I watch my TiVo downloading and preparing all the programme data. I have been a programmer, so I can conceive what is happening inside the box. But what amazes me is that you took a machine designed to run with one source of EPG, and got it all working seamlessly with a different source. Thank you so much.

However, as a dial-up user, I am worried about what you might be working on now, especially increasing the number of days of programme data that you are sending out. Everyone's daily call will be different, but a weekly forced call for me is already 35 minutes. I do a download every Friday afternoon, and get data through to the following Saturday night. This suits me perfectly. Remembering that we have never had more than seven days of data from Sky, or from reading Radio Times, I would like to vote for you to leave things as they are, please. At the moment, my calls are free, but it is only a matter of time until the phone provider realises that the 0161 number is used for data... It is also convenient that there is no data after the Saturday evening that I need to ignore, as I run through the channels selecting programmes to record.

If you are proposing to change things, perhaps you could arrange for network users to get more, perhaps with an option, but for dial-up to stay as-is. Sorry if this sounds selfish, I'm just expressing an opinion.

[mrtickle]

Speaking personally and not for anyone else, I'm pleasantly surprised how happy I am having less data - my TiVo is noticeably far more responsive than in the past when it was burdened with Tribune's massive 3-week Sky lineup (and that is with a cachecard). We're not ready to add any more days data in the short term I don't think. There are numerous more pressing issues to deal with - the ability to automatically process schedule updates for one!

[socrates]

I'm amazed at some of the dial up times quoted - mine rarely exceed 5 minutes and are often around 3. Judging by my general broadband speeds I don't think my phone line is particularly good so I doubt my dial up speeds are exceptional. I can only assume it's the number of channels. I'm not interested in sport and won't touch Sky so it's just the former terrestrial channels and a few of the Freeview ones - maybe 20 or so in total. In practise only 6 - 8 of those get viewed often.

Are others really downloading 6 or 7 times as many channels as me or do download times increase disproportionately as channels increase?

[mikerr]

If you're doing a call daily - that's a smaller download than leaving it for a week and one large week's worth of programes in one download...
He's doing the call 7 times less frequently - so is 7 times more data

For call lengths here's a few facts:

- deselecting channels in "channel I receive" doesn't reduce the call time at all, it always downloads all channels in your lineup
- the sky lineup is much bigger than the freeview lineup, so longer downloads on sky.
- you never download the same data (slices) twice, so calls once a day are shorter than once a week.

Old tivo service had many different lineups for regions at postcode level, which led to shorter downloads,
but much more complexity and maintenance at server end. Altepg "keeps it simple" with one lineup for the whole UK.

Modems can connect at massively varying speeds based on current line conditions etc and also reduce speed during the call.
56k at best, but down to 0.96k on a poor line.
Tivo doesn't give any feedback on that, so you often have no idea if its a big download, or a slow connection.

ADSL broadband can adversely affect (analogue) modem speeds, even when people use broadband filters - plus filters can and do go faulty.

[socrates]

Aha! - thanks for that, I hadn't noticed that the 35 mins referred to a weekly call so 7 times as long makes sense. Nor did I know that deselecting channels doesn't change the download. I use it more like a two tier favourites - ie "Favourites" for the ones I regularly use, "You Receive" for ones I occasionally watch and the rest ( even if I can actually receive them ) get deselected.

Don't want to get too far off topic but does anyone know which categories Wishlists cover - just "you Receive" or all?

[mikerr]

Don't want to get too far off topic but does anyone know which categories Wishlists cover - just "you Receive" or all?

Wishlists are confined to those ticked in "channels I receive".

Bizarrely a Season Pass will continue to record even after its channel is deselected from "channels I receive"
- but that can be useful if you only watch that SP on that channel, and don't want wishlists picking up programmes from there.

As for channel coverage, freeview is pretty comprehensive, sky much less so
The issue with adding 30 new channels isn't really the download time, but the increase in editing workload