tivo-1.jpgThis is great - for those of you who have had the life-changing experience of owning a TiVo, things just got a lot better. TiVo has added bolean search to their wishlist management.

What this means is that while in the past, you were stuck choosing either to record:

  • Any show named ‘Mythbusters’, or
  • Any showing that listed ‘Adam Savage’, or
  • Any showing that listed ‘Jaime Hyneman’, or
  • Any showing on channel 48 at 9pm…
  • (etc)

You can now use AND, OR or XOR…which TiVo calls ‘This and that’, ‘This or that’, and ‘This but not that’. So if you’re a big fan of the Mythbusters, and want to see where they pop up elsewhere other than on the show, you can record Mythbusters Wednesday nights, but you can also make a WishList to record shows where the title has the keywords ‘Jaime Hyneman’ AND ‘Adam Savage’.

Other uses for this might be if you’re a NASCAR fan and want just the races. You could choose keyword = ‘NASCAR’ AND category = ‘Auto Racing’. That way, you get the races and none of the NASCAR talk shows.

Or maybe you want all showings where title = ‘Late Night with Conan O’Brien’ and keyword = ‘Andy Richter’, and nostalgicize about the old days.

A few notes, however: (TiVo this is your homework)

  1. I could add multiple items, but had no way to select ‘AND’ or ‘OR’. It just shows a dot between the keywords, so I’m at a loss as to what that means. No idea where I can choose the ‘This but not that’. I have a pretty non-standard TiVo unit (Toshiba TiVo/DVD player), but that seems like a major voyage of the failboat on TiVo’s fault. Too difficult to have a lab with all the models in it to test feature rollouts?
  2. TiVo’s database is terrible. It seems that I can only choose from actor’s names that will be on shows in the next few weeks. How hard could it be to give imdb.com a ring and work out a linkup? For example, I put in ‘Carolla’, and no listing for Adam. So no luck for people who want to catch Adam on any rare rerun of the Man Show? I realize his other shows aren’t in the rotation these days, but at least give people the capability to toss that net out there just on the offchance that they’re reshown at 3am some day.