Virgin Media Powered by TiVo

[imilne]

http://www.trustedreviews.com/home-cinem...By-TiVo/p1

Anyone got one/getting one?

I'm not sure if I see the appeal myself. Unless I'm missing something, it just appears to be a pretty face on nothing more sophisticated than genre searching? Although I guess it must hold *slightly* more info than that on each programme otherwise it would just end up recording every "action" movie as soon as you said you liked one of them. Who knows...maybe it does.

Iain

[ACTCMS]

TiVo will predict what you like to watch, based on your viewing patterns and record the shows you may want to watch, without you having to lift a finger.

Yeah - it would surely have to be something more than just genre.

Among other stuff, I'm interested in music programs, so my solution is to have EWA/NEWA set to autorecord anything containing various keywords like session, concert, whistle test, pink floyd, etc. It finds a lot of good stuff (some garbage too, but then that's easily deleted).

Alex

[imilne]

Yeah - it would surely have to be something more than just genre.

I suppose it could take time into account, eg, the kind of action movie you might "like" at 11pm on a Friday night is probably not something that would be classed as similar to anything shown at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon.

Iain

[bgowland]

I think the key (as it says in the review) is "after it gets to know you a little though".

The original TiVos were sold heavily on this viewer profiling feature. I knew I guy who had one of the originals quite a few years ago and he reckoned it was pretty good although, like Alex with EWA/NEWA, there were false positives along the way.

It's likely that this sort of thing can work better with providers such as Sky and Virgin as they can pump all sorts of proprietary information down the stream... genres/sub-genres/sub-sub-genres etc You could have Film / Action / War / Vietnam. It could even track actors etc. Film / Any / John Wayne and so on.

It's also likely to learn why you reject recommendations (you may like Sport but not Golf for example).

Prediction based purely on analysis is likely to be a lot less successful than analysis based on user feedback.

[mvallevand]

It's likely that this sort of thing can work better with providers such as Sky and Virgin as they can pump all sorts of proprietary information down the stream... genres/sub-genres/sub-sub-genres etc You could have Film / Action / War / Vietnam. It could even track actors etc. Film / Any / John Wayne and so on.

Certainly the EPG data I get allows for this and this is where I wanted to take SearchLite and eventually NEWA, but there is effectively zero interest from NPVR users.

As an example I have this EPG entry

Code:

<programme start="20110419050000 +0000" stop="20110419071500 +0000" channel="233298875">
    <title lang="en">The Horse Soldiers</title>
    <duration units="minutes">135</duration>
    <desc lang="en">A pacifist doctor (William Holden) joins a Union colonel's (John Wayne) cavalry raid in Confederate territory.</desc>
    <episode-num system="dd_progid">MV000018760000</episode-num>
    <credits>
      <actor>John Wayne</actor>
      <actor>William Holden</actor>
      <actor>Constance Towers</actor>
      <director>John Ford</director>
    </credits>
    <date>1959</date>
    <video>
      <aspect>16:9</aspect>
    </video>
    <subtitles type="teletext" />
    <star-rating>
      <value>3.0/4</value>
      <icon src="C:\bin32\epg\RatingIcons\Star\3.0.gif" />
    </star-rating>
    <category>Movie</category>
    <category>Action and Adventure</category>
  </programme>

And because SearchLite enhances it with IMDB genres

The Horse Soldiers (1959) Adventure
The Horse Soldiers (1959) War
The Horse Soldiers (1959) Western

All the data is there. IMDB credit/crews list can easily add actors that aren't in the EPG data too.

I was working on Auto Record, but first I need to set a system of "perma ban" unique ids so I don't have to clean these too often. Sub choose not to comment on my wishlist discussion on being able to indicate HD vs SD as a recording preference, so I have had to include this in the mix (ie record the HD version of ...) Until I have this Alex's idea of recording and deleting is probably the best way to go.

Martin

[sub]

Sub choose not to comment on my wishlist discussion on being able to indicate HD vs SD as a recording preference

NPVR usually does not know whether a channel is SD or HD. Sometimes it is reported in the channel metadata collected at scan time, but more often than not the app only knows if a channel is MPEG2 or H.264, and doesnt know if it is HD or SD until the user is watching the channel or recording the channel.

[mvallevand]

That is why I was requested the partial solution to give channel level priority since tuner level doesn't help.

However North American EPG data does provide some additional help too.

This is an HD broadcast

<video>
<quality>HDTV</quality>
</video>

An HD channel would show this in HD

<video>
<quality>HD Simulcast</quality>
</video>

Martin

[sub]

That is why I was requested the partial solution to give channel level priority since tuner level doesn't help.

I dont really understand. How would you envisage this working?

[mvallevand]

I will write something on this but I will show you how my guide is a mess, if I want to record the CBC National news tonight I get the attached.

CBOT = analog cable, CBOT-DT ATSC ,CBOT-DA HDVPR
CBNEWS = analog cable CBNEWHD HDPVR


I would like to be able to merge these into two EPG entries and have the Recording Quality determine which tuner to prefer.

Pretty much all shows are like this because they are on US and Canadian HD and SD. This is worse because for now the ATSC is limited, but all local stations will be HD this year.

Martin

[bgowland]

Certainly the EPG data I get allows for this and this is where I wanted to take SearchLite and eventually NEWA, but there is effectively zero interest from NPVR users.

From my personal point of view, I've always been interested in this sort of facility (going back to my early use of gbpvr) but I've never actively sought it out due to quality / consistency of EPG data.

I have a simple setup which is basically SD DVB-T. The DVB OTA EPG is primitive to say the least so I tend to use XMLTV from the Radio Times website. Some of the programme data is quite detailed as in your example but very often it only goes so far or is completely lacking.

Ultimately that means, ironically, I don't trust the EPG data source to provide full details and therefore haven't really looked at the possibilities. Something which provided recommendations based on previous activity (rather than automatically scheduled recordings) would certainly be interesting though.

Cheers,
Brian