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• Search using Wish Lists :
  Tucked inside the Pick Programmes to Record menu, this is a feature akin to the Smart Search function in Digiguide, a program that PC owners will find as useful as their TiVo to ensure they don't miss out on an important programme.

  Firstly you can set up a wishlist which will look out for any one of a number of pre-defined actors and directors, but if you cannot find what you're looking for there, it's possible to input a name of your choice in the format "surname, forename" and works very well indeed. I couldn't find Neil Innes' name in the actor list - which can double up as a presenter list for different types of shows - but I typed his name in and successfully found "Away with Words" on Discovery Civilisation. However, the list within the TiVo is a very extensive one so should have most of what you're looking for.

  A "category only" wishlist can be created. Regular users will have noticed that each programme they watch will have one or more categories assigned to it such as "Films", "Documentary", "Talk Shows" or "Comedy". Each of these will also have sub-categories (the "Sports" section has 41!) and can be tailored to suit accordingly.

  "Keyword" and "Title" wishlists are in there too. Input the required word(s) and TiVo will search for those.

  After creating your varied wishlists, you can then tell TiVo to auto-record any upcoming programmes that fit, you can view the ones it has found, edit the wishlists or delete them.

• Overtime scheduler :
  When setting up a manual recording, or picking a programme from the schedules, you could never guarantee that something would start on time. Some channels are reliable, but both BBC and ITV are far from that and will require you to add a few minutes before the recording or to add some afterwards.

  The first thing you'll notice in the "recording options" sub-menu is that the 'record quality' has been moved here, so you can pick from Best, High, Medium or Basic, as usual.

  Most programmes will be kept for at least two days on the hard drive, pending anything else pre-set so if they're not lasting that long then you're recording too much. However, for anything important, "Keep at least" will keep a programme for either 'until space needed' (the default), 1-7 days, or 'until I delete'.

  Options have also been included now to adjust the start and end of the recording time, in addition to what has been already set up. Manually recording a programme, you used to only be able to set up a programme in five-minute blocks, which isn't much good when you have two programmes close to each other in which one is bound to slightly over-run and the next will start slightly too late. Similarly, for some consecutive shows, one will slightly under-run while the next starts early.

  The new update allows you to start a programme 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 10 minutes early, or to end it 1, 2, 5, 15, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 1½ hours or 3 hours later.

  This is definitely welcome, but it's difficult to understand why I can't just specify exact times by entering them on the remote keypad now that the TiVo can think in individual minutes. For an example described above that works, E.R. always over-runs on E4 to just past 10.30pm on a Thursday night, while ITV's Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned always starts slightly late, even though it's meant to begin at 10.30pm. I worked out that 10.32pm is a safe programme junction to swap over and I can set this up.

  However, for early finishers, things aren't so lucky. On a Tuesday evening, Hollyoaks will end at approximately 6.58pm and, on BBC1, Watchdog starts around the same time, but if I was to record the former manually from 6.30 to 6.55 I could only extend the finishing time to 6.56, 6.57 or 7.00 given the current software. 6.57pm is the closest match but no good for my needs as it won't have finished by then.

  The overtime scheduler option also allows you to alter recording times for programmes already in the 'To Do List'.

• Season Pass Manager :
  Again, under the Pick Programmes to Record menu, creating a season pass is one thing and has already been covered above. Until now, if it's not been quite what you were after you've had to cancel it and start again. Now, if the basics are wrong, such as channel, plus the start and finish time are wrong then you will have to go back to square one, but options are available to alter certain things.

  'Record quality', plus the start and stop time extensions, function as per the overtime scheduler, but the first extra option, "Keep at most", isn't something I've thought about too much, probably because it's more for when your hard drive is getting full, but you can select to keep 1-5 or all episodes of the selected programme for either until 'space needed' or 'until I delete'.

  In the main menu of the Season Pass Manager, though, a list of all season passes is shown with the option to place one programme above the rest so that if a conflict occurs between two shows then it'll record the uppermost one. However, anyone recording something new that conflicts with an existing planned recording should spot this at the time when alerted by the TiVo, but a clash could always occur later.

• Parental Controls :
  This isn't something I have to consider myself, since I'm not a parent, but it's a useful facility for those who have children. Of course, it's also worth pointing out that you must hide both your TiVo and Sky/ITVDigital/etc decoder remote controls so that they don't bypass the TiVo by simply unplugging it and getting access to the functions on the decoder.

  Placed within the Messages & Setup and then the My Preferences section, there are various ways to restrict what your children can view.

  The obvious one is the Channel locks. With this, you can lock/unlock all channels, or lock individual ones as desired.

  A Movie Rating Limit allows you to set which level of BBFC certificate you will let your children watch, depending on their age. Options for U, PG, 12, 15 and 18 are available.

  Movies can also be blocked according to their Content, be it S (sexual content), L (language), V (violence), M (violent material). Of course, for this to work, all the films available to you must carry these ratings. I don't subscribe to the movie channels myself so cannot state how reliable those channels are for this.

  Auto Re-lock is a useful function for parents who want to watch a film normally restricted, but would like things to return to their status quo afterwards. With this activated, if the parental controls are turned off temporarily, they are turned back on automatically if nobody uses the remote control for four hours.

  Note that for almost every selection within this part of TiVo, a 4-digit passcode is required, so don't use birthdays, "1234" or anything your children will be able to guess.

The new Season Pass Manager.

Improvements to existing TiVo features

• View Recording History :
  This option sits atop the 'To Do List' and will tell you, in detail, what happened to each programme the TiVo recorded or was cancelled by the user or deleted by TiVo for some reason.

  After watching 24, for example, I deleted the recording so the main menu lists it as deleted, but upon pressing SELECT I can find out the time and date the recording was deleted. Similarly, this works if the TiVo has to delete something to make way for more programmes, or if the TiVo simply didn't record it because the same programme was already recorded (this is a bit hit and miss and depends on how the schedules are constructed. For example, it knows not to record the late afternoon repeat of Neighbours if the lunchtime recording is already there, but it doesn't distinguish between any of the three showings per day for the same episode of Eldorado on UK Gold).

  On the downside this means the 'recording history' menu is rather cluttered because it's still listing every episode of Away With Words long after I cancelled the Season Pass.

  Bizarrely, it has also doubled-up on some programmes so claims it won't record things when it will because it thinks I've asked for them twice, although even if I had it should realise the original request should not even be counted. Does that make sense? To clarify, I first set up Futurama as a Season Pass but found it would also record several repeating episodes within the week which I didn't want, so found it easier to cancel the season pass as it stood - since the new episodes weren't classified as such within their own billing, so the 'First Run' recording option wouldn't work - and just told it to record from 7pm to 7.30pm on Sky One every Sunday.

  Still, for the above such faults, it still helps to find out when certain programmes were deleted, which is usually because the hard drive was full and I didn't get round to watching various things, so the programmes had been deleted within a few hours of being recorded.

• View Upcoming Episodes :
  When searching for a programme to record, not only can you record the next available show, but this option will show all forthcoming episodes across all channels, all of which you can choose to record or not as desired.

  This is handy because you can look up for individual episodes of programmes, but at the same time while it told me that there were five episodes of a particular programme coming up shortly, it was actually referring to the same episode at the same time on BBC2 for analogue and all four regions on SkyDigital.

  Again, this is only a minor niggle and the function is far more of a help than any kind of a hinderance.

• More control when recording from Live TV :
  As regular TiVo users will know, the unit will store up to half-an-hour of live TV in its buffer, for you to rewind back and watch as required.

  However, now when you press record during a programme, it will record it from the start if it began during the previous half-hour and the TiVo was already on that channel for the duration so it's in the buffer. If the programme has been on for longer then it will record just the last half-hour.

  For example, if you walk in and the TiVo has been on BBC1 for all the time Eastenders was on, but you only remembered 20 minutes into the programme, pressing 'record' will keep do just that for the whole of that episode. This is very handy indeed and I managed to get all of an episode of Location Location Location this way as well as an episode of The Bill on UK Gold 2 with Neil Stuke guest-starring after walking in on them both nearly halfway through.

• Enhanced Save to VCR :
  Rather than counting down from 5 to 1, this option now displays a black screen with the details of the programme before it starts. If you need to stop saving it to the VCR part-way through you can now pick up from where you left off.

  However, I still don't use this function because I'll record something with enough space before and after the programme, so will play the programme as normal and then cue up the exact start of the programme.

• Save Disk Space :
  When recording in Best, High or Medium mode, this will attempt to save disk space for programmes that have a high quality signal, but contain little movement. This can result in a lower quality picture as a result, so I prefer to specify when I want to record in lower-quality modes, which is usually if I'm recording something from one of the radio channels on Sky.

• Channel Banner Short Cuts :
  To save going into the menus, you can now access the options to record the current programme (see "More control when recording from Live TV" above), or access the parental controls and TiVo messages.

• Customising the TiVo Live TV Guide :
  Rather than search through all the channels for what's on right now, you can now break this down into either channels you receive or favourites. The day/date and time are now selectable as well as selecting various categories. See Search using Wish Lists above for more info on these.

A couple enjoying their TiVo yesterday.

Additional TiVo changes that I like

• The To Do List now tells you when items are going to be deleted so you can plan ahead or extend their lifetime.

• When new TiVo messages appear, you can use the "Channel up/down" button to scroll a whole page at a time rather than one line at a time. This is much better this way.

• When pausing a timed recording, the timeline disappears after a short while so doesn't stay on screen permenantly like it used to.

• When fast-forwarding through programmes, if you press the button that normally sends you to the end of the programme, it will now move you on through to 15-minute junctions.

• When watching a programme normally, while you can still toggle between the end and beginning of a recorded programme with this button, you can now do this during a live recording with what is already in the recorded buffer, whereas before it would only send you to the end of the buffer.

• Analogue teletext subtitles (888) are supported with this software release. These are available through all analogue terrestrial channels, as well as selected SkyDigital channels such as many BBC variants and some BBC/Flextech channels such as UK Gold. I thought it was a big omission that this pass-thru wasn't available originally and wasn't holding out a massive amount of hope for them to be included now because fewer and fewer channels are using them, but they're far better than those subtitles generated by the respective digibox because analogue subtitles can be switched on/off at will via the TV's teletext service (even on playback of a TiVo recording) or through a suitably-equipped VCR such as the Panasonic NVFJ710, whereas if you record a programme with digibox-generated subtitles on, you're stuck with them forever as they're burned into the TV signal.

• Not sure if this is new to this release, but when playing a DVD through the TiVo - and I only noticed this when running the Xbox through the machine, which made Halo interesting - I found the TiVo ignores the Macrovision copy protection! Bonus!

• Finally, the TiVo used to dial up approximately every 27 hours. Now, it has changed this to approximately every 24 hours so it should still dial-up around the same time every day. This is very useful so I can ensure it will dial-up while I'm out at work rather than when I'm at home and using the internet. Note that the 'phone connection' setting has moved one sub-menu further so that it is now within the Messages & Setup, then Recorder & Phone Setup option.

Things I'd still like to see changed

• Since the update, when changing channels, the screen goes black for a split-second after typing the channel number in and then comes back with same channel before making the change. Why? This is a step backwards.

• There is still no simple channel up/down function yet, so if I'm on BBC1 on Sky Digital and press 'channel up', it will enter '1, 0, 2', rather than copying the Sky remote 'channel up' function.

• When a recording ends, the TiVo still repeats the channel number so if you've changed over part-way through on purpose, it takes you back to the channel it thinks you're recording. I still don't understand what the point is of repeating the channel number at the end of the recording. They would be better off implementing the inclusion of the "Sky" button at the start of the recording before the channel is changed, just in case the Sky box has crashed and put itself in standby, which is happening more frequently as the digiboxes are getting older and the manufacturers aren't fixing this problem in the software.

• I have both analogue ITV (channel 59) and SkyDigital ITV (channel 103) in my set up, but surely when I tell it to record from one or the other then it'll do what I request. Frequently, though, if I try to set up analogue ITV, it will default to 103. This can also be a bit hit and miss with the analogue versions of BBC1 and BBC2 and their Sky counterparts.

• I would still like to see radio listings implemented. They are carried on Sky Digital and on Digiguide, on my PC, but there's no such listings within TiVo's schedules.

• I would also like to rename programme titles as previously described in the main TiVo review.

OVERALL

For further info on the TiVo, you can visit the Official UK TiVo website and there is plenty of discussion daily at: AVS Forum: TiVo UK.

Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2002.

DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.

PC games reviewed by the editor are on: