March 12, 2007
TiVo not gonna fix Series One DST bug
As I hope you all know by now, we changed over to daylight savings time early here in the US this year. I love that, but it HAS caused me one problem
Late last week, at the last minute, TiVo announced that their Series One PVRs had a bug that made them uncompliant with the new time change, and they said they were not going to fix it.
This is pretty disappointing of TiVo. Another black mark against what once was an innovative, customer-centric company.
[ As for why a tech savvy guy like me is still using an antique Series One Tivo, well hey, it still works just fine, and few of the features of the newer series two machines have been attractive enough to make me change.
AND, Tivo still takes my money every month for using the Series one so they must think it's still OK too. ]
Anyway, the bug is this: Although season's passes and shows programmed to record with the builtin directory will continue to record OK, from now till the April 7 -- the original date for the time change -- the clock on my Tivo will be off by an hour.
The clock is off when showing me the time of day, and when displaying the times for all shows in the program guide.
Plus, any shows which I program it to record using the so-called manual settings -- that is, by manually selecting the channel and time -- will have to be programmed to be off by an hour for the next three weeks, then changed back to the correct times.
Tivo describes this as "only a cosmetic issue", which is just... well... this is a family website.
But, displaying something pink instead of blue, or round corners instead of square, that's a cosmetic issue. displaying the wrong time, in a system which is so much about time, is plain and simple a bug, and ought to be fixed.
On their website Tivo says that their engineers had looked for solutions for this and that "none exist".
As a programmer my first thought is that this seems unlikely. That they could fix it if they wanted, and that they just decided they didn't want to.
I suspect that's what's going on here.
But at dinner the other night, a programmer friend suggested that since it's been years since they've done any updates to the series one software, they might not have anyone on staff who knows the software well enough to fix it. or worse, they may not even have the source code anymore -- which would be a sad commentary, but it's not impossible.
In any event, this is a disappointing way for Tivo to be handling this whole thing. it feels worse for me 'cause I used to be one of those people who was proud to say I loved my Tivo.
Well, I still love my PVR, but I don't love Tivo any more.
12 Mar 2007 07:57 AM | Send comments to comments@techpopuli.net