TiVo wishlist tip

Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google posted a great wishlist tip:

Make a wishlist with keyword (say) 2004 and restrict it to the genre of Movies. Presto: browsing the wishlist gives you all the movies from 2004.

I often forget that the wishlist functionality is so flexible and so deep. Ever since I got a 16:9 aspect ratio TV, I've had a wishlist for movies/letterbox but it sounds like I could add in 2004 or 2005 and get just recent films.

I kind of wish that season passes and wishlists supported "greater than" or "less than" when adding criteria. For instance, often when I discover a new show, if I set a season pass, it will grab every new and old show, when sometimes I just want the current season of that show so that I'm not seeing things out of order ("give me all copies of 'six feet under' that debuted in 2005"). For this new movie wishlist, I wish I could say "give me all letterboxed movies that are less than five years old".

Comments

[Measure]

My only frustration with tivo search is this: I'd like to search for movies by channel.

For instance, I'd like to see just the movies comedy central is showing. Or perhaps I'm tired of american censorship and only want to see movies coming up on the CBC.

I have not yet found a way to do this. Anyone know how?

[Mr. Teeny]

Yes, every 12 days or so, scroll forward in the onscreen Guide to check out which movies are coming up on Comedy Central.

[NL]

"For this new movie wishlist, I wish I could say "give me all letterboxed movies that are less than five years old"."

Keyword=200* would give results very close to this.

[Measure]

Scroll forward on the onscreen guide for two weeks? Seriously, do you know how slow and boring that can be? I even tried filtering the guide by 'movies only' once, and it still didn't work out very well.

I'd much prefer a wishlist that could collect the data for me.

[warrenpeace]

I wish that I could create wishlists with a keyword and then have a couple words I don't want to include (like how a web search engine works). I have a wishlist for 'architect*' so that it'll record anything with that in the show info and I've found a ton of programming that I would have otherwise missed.

There area lot of annoying things that come up every week though. Wish I could use 'architect* -lawn', so I don't get every landscaping show on HGTV.

[Mr. Teeny]

Yes, I do. I regularly scroll through the IFC listings in the guide to see what movies are coming up. You can read through 12 days' worth of entries and schedule recordings in less than 10 minutes.

[Rob Austin]

An easier thing to do is to go to the IFC, or Starz, or Encore or...whatever...website and look at their monthly guide.

Keep another browser window open logged into your TIVO web scheduling and if you see stuff for the next 12 days you want, schedule it from there. It's a lot asier then scrolling on the TIVO.

--*Rob

[Aaron Gustafson]

Browse By Channel is much better than the guide for finding upcoming movies on a a specific channel over a certain time period. Good idea on the recent movies thing though.

[Mr. Teeny]

In what way is Browse By Channel much better than using the Guide? It's almost in the same, in that you scroll forward in time within a channel's listings, but actually it is somewhat worse than using the Guide becaus less of the program's title is displayed, approximately 18 characters as opposed to 23.

[rascalking]

Just my two bits, but isn't the point of the wishlist supposed to be that we don't have to manually sift through listings, that the tivo just grabs the stuff we want?

(you could probably write a tivoweb plugin to do something along those lines if you had more than the minimal grasp of tcl I've got)

[Todd Lokken]

Not so much a Tivo request, but I'd really like Direct TV to open up all the Tivo functionality.

Todd Lokken

[aidy]

Anyone know how to use the '@' sign in a wishlist? I want to record "Red Sox @ Yankees" but NOT record Red Sox Rewind or some crap commentary.
Or can I exlcude shows automatically that continually want to record?