Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)

TiVo Remote

Warning: This is going to be one of those über-nerdy posts that you love or loathe, depending on who you are.

(Click image to embiggenate)

I’d like to talk to you about two buttons on my DirecTV remote, specially the “Live TV” button (top right) and the “Enter/Last” button (bottom right).

As you might expect, the “Live TV” button is primarily used to exit whatever program you are in (scheduling, etc) to get to live television. This is often used when you are in one of the menus (i.e. scheduling a recording, watching something you’ve recorded on your DVR, etc) and decide you want to watch something “live”.

As you might also expect, the “Enter/Last” button has more than one function.

Enter: Changing the channel? Press a few digits and hit enter to change the channel.

Last: Go back to the last (previous) channel that you were watching.

Seems completely straightforward, right?

Now, assume you have a DirecTV with TiVo with two satellite inputs (meaning that you can record two programs at once). Say you were watching two programs at once, switching back and forth between them during commercials.

Which button would you use? The “Live TV” button or the “Enter/Last” button.

Enter/Last will switch back and forth between them, but it will do so with no “memory” — that is to say, when you switch to the other channel, you won’t be able to “rewind” at all.

However, if you press the “Live TV” button, you can switch back and forth between two channels and each channel will use the 30-minute recording buffer, meaning that you can “rewind” up to 30 minutes.

So you have a button explicitly labeled to go back/forth between channels (“Last”) which doesn’t utilize a feature of the DVR which will be utilized if you use another button (“Live TV”) which is not only not labeled for the feature that you want, but logically doesn’t fit.

If I want “Live” with no memory then I ought to use the “Live TV” button, but the “Live TV” button gives me a 30-minute memory on both channels.

First world problem? Yeah, no shit, but setting that aside, how do people who design this stuff for a living let something like that slip past them?

I mean, if you have the feature to be able to remember 30 minutes on two channels, why not use it for both buttons? Or if you are going to make it work for only one of the two, why not make it the one that logically fits by the label that you’ve assigned it?

The good news is that I finally figured out why it “sometimes” seems to work and sometimes doesn’t — apparently my muscle memory knew to use the “Live TV” button, but when I actually thought about it, I kept using the “Enter/Last” button and wondered why it wasn’t working as I expected.

Update: Nic Barajas and [Dan Wineman)(http://venomousporridge.com/) (comments below) both point out that the difference here is between switching between two tuners (Live TV) and switching between two channels on the same tuner (Enter/Last), which makes sense… once you know that is what it is doing… and which makes no sense if you don’t.