Back in simpler times when I was living in Alaska. my TiVo setup was pretty simple. The only signal I had was OTA from an antenna on my roof, and all I received was four channels (well, five actually, but I told TiVo to ignore the religious channel). Wish lists and season passes were simple.

Now I'm in the big world, and my cable hookup is feeding something in excess of 400 channels into the house. It's a bit overwhelming. In Alaska, I set up a wish list for Science/Nature programs, and I would get Nova and Scientific American Frontiers off of NPR, once in a while a National Geographic special. Maybe five or six programs a month from that wish list. Now I get thirty or forty of them in a two day period. So, that doesn't work.

I found out that TiVo at long last supports exclusions in keyword searches, but I can't make it work. Supposedly if you preface the keyword with a thumbs-up (or thumbs-down, either will work) it puts a minus sign in front of the keyword and makes it an exclusion word rather than a required word. This doesn't seem to work for me, no minus sign appears. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong? How deep into the program description do keyword searches go? For my exclusion I need to search past the title and the program description, right down to the boilerplate of what kind of program it is. Specifically, I need to look for "Auto racing, sports non-event" and key on "sports non" as an exclusion so I don't end up recording the NASCAR shopping channel and the pre-race show etc.

Is there any place I can go that will give me a list of all the channels I receive and a brief description of what the channel is about? That way I can exclude about 350 of the 400 channels I receive as being not worth my interest, like the religious channels, and the shopping channels, and the cooking channels, and the cartoon channels, etc.

I am not happy with the picture quality I am getting. I am running a Gen-II TiVo (single tuner with integrated DVD burner) into a Sharp Aquos 32" LCD LC-C3242U High Definition set, and the picture quality is so poor that I can't even read the numbers on the race cars. (Update: this was with TiVo at lowest quality. At highest or next-to-highest quality it is acceptable, but not great.) I think the root of my picture quality difficulties lies with the TV set, not the TiVo. There is little if any difference in picture quality if I run the signal directly from the cable box into the TV set, bypassing the TiVo.

My setup is like this: Cable comes into the house and into a splitter, one leg going to the Motorola Cable Box, the other leg to a cable modem and router for internet and VOIP phone service.

The Motorola cable box sends signal to the TiVo, through S-Video and regular audio connections. The TiVo sends the signal to Input 1 on the TV set as component video. (The TiVo doesn't have component input, just output.) When I select Input 1 on the TV set, it flashes a brief message that it is running at 480P resolution. Is this normal for my setup? I have no idea what sort of resolutions TV sets use, but 480 seems low compared to my LCD computer monitor which is running 1680 x 1050. Or is this an apples and oranges comparison?

I do receive some HD channels and they don't look any different from the regular channels. Question: If TiVo is recording an HD program, is it using more disk space than a regular program, or is the space it takes dictated strictly by the quality level set for the recording?

As you can tell, I am a complete newbie when it comes to home theater (well, Home Theater is a bit of an overstatement here -- I have a cable box, a TiVo and a 32 inch TV set) and any help or advice will be appreciated.

tanstaafl.