Digital Home Thoughts: Tivo Bug Drops Show Content

"Because of a software glitch in some machines, TiVo customers have been discovering over the last few months that some of the shows they had set to record were cut off before the programs ended. "I lost the last 15 minutes of 'Lost,' as well as 'C.S.I.,' " said Monica Sharma, a marketing solutions manager in Piscataway, N.J. "Regrettably, the big things happened at the end." The first notice of the problem came in November, when a few befuddled TiVo users posted complaints on TiVo's Web site. Customers also wrote about the glitch more recently at tivocommunity.com, an independent site for TiVo aficionados. A TiVo employee who monitors the sites posted a response there saying the company was on the case."

Not being able to rely on your DVR is a sad thing - I sometimes have similar problems with my Windows Media Center 2005 machine, though it's always a case of the system clock being wrong or the network having a show start early or end late. Even when I set MCE to record before/after a show, if there's another show on right after that, it won't record the extra time. My box has dual tuners, so you'd think that it would keep recording long on the first tuner then use the second tuner to record the show. I'm not sure if it does that though. At any rate, check out the New York Times article. Have you had your PVR fail you at critical moments?

Spoiler alert: the article has a Sopranos spoiler in the first paragraph, much to my dismay because I hadn't seen that episode yet (I buy the DVD boxed sets and haven't started watching season five yet). This is a side rant, but it's idiotic when journalists put spoilers in their articles rather than just saying that a certain dramatic event happened. They might think they're cool and hip for referencing pop culture, but it just ruins it for everyone that hasn't seen it yet.