Tivo Hacks. 100 Industrial-strength Tips Tools 2003

Hack 11 Turning Off Overshoot Protection

Turn off the overshoot protection to put fast forwarding completely under your own control .

Part of TiVo's charm is that it tries to protect you from yourself. It takes care of scheduling changes in the television shows, records new shows that you might have forgotten to request, and makes sure you don't fast forward too far when trying to get through a commercial break. But what if you want to have unmediated control over your fast forward? Well, now you can. This hack turns overshoot protection off.

The dilemma with fast forwarding is that you never know precisely where to stop. You find yourself zooming along through the commercials and watching the screen like a hawk, waiting for your program to start. Unless you're blessed with superhuman hand-eye coordination or have spent way too many hours playing twitch-reflex video games , you see your program come with the end of the commercials on the screen, inevitably overshoot by a few seconds, and therefore command your finger to hit a moment too late to catch the beginning of your program. Thankfully, the TiVo creators anticipated this problem and introduced overshoot protection ; when you hit after fast forwarding, TiVo backs up ever so slightly, usually just enough to bring you to where you thought you should be.

But if you're a die-hard TiVo user , you might find overshoot protection akin to an automatic transmission when you'd rather prefer to drive a stick. You've probably picked up on a pattern in the way that commercials are ordered; usually right before the television show starts, the network either puts up an advertisement for itself or for one of its upcoming shows. You have the timing down to an art and just want to move overshoot protection out of the way. To do so, enable backdoors [Hack #8], then pick up your remote and enter:

Clear Enter Clear 5

Reenter the sequence if you decide automatic is for you after all.