I Have To Wait How Long?

Okay, so Comcast's DVR sucks. I had a "series recording" set for Prison Break, but in reviewing my schedule, it wasn't picking up this week's episode. So I explicitly set the thing to record it. Which it didn't. If I'm driven to a life of BitTorrent-fueled crime, they aided and abetted.

As if that weren't enough, it seems that the series recording setting looks for the absence of "repeat" when judging whether or not a show is a first-run episode, rather than the presence of "new" in the description. I went to set up The Simpsons, and it wanted to record every showing of the syndicated episodes as well. Same deal for The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park. Allegedly, I can set up a repeating manual recording, but the sequence of instructions cast enough doubt when I was trying it that I bailed halfway through and just selected each instance of each show I wanted individually.

This will not do.

From what I hear, the integration of the Comcast box and the TiVo software -- if that's even the form of the partnership, rather than a new box entirely -- isn't happening until late next year. That's going to be a rough, rough wait, although there's anecdotal evidence that Comcast is trying to fix the series recording bugs before then. With the dual-tuner DVR, using my TiVo box to make sure I get stuff is a little bit tricky, but I may have to resort to it as a backup.