If you’re a bingewatcher you might have bumped up against the absolute link for the number of series links you can record on DIRECTV. You can set up 100 series or recurring recordings, that’s it. That’s all. To most of us that seems like that’s enough but if you’re a power TV watcher it might not do it for you, especially if you like to stack things up for watching later in the year.
The limit used to be 50, but with Genie came an increase to 100. That’s good, but it doesn’t mask the fact that once upon the time, you had the ability to put unlimited recurring recordings into your DVR. With the TiVo DVRs of DIRECTV’s days gone by, there simply wasn’t a limit. At least if there was, no one ever hit it. Maybe it was 1,000 or something equally stratospheric. But it’s frustrating to think that we had that capability ten years ago and we don’t have it now.
Realistically, though, with everything that DVRs do today they need a little break. The scheduling logic for DVRs is pretty complex, checking literally thousands of channels and getting guide data updates every few minutes. It’s a lot to do and it does make sense that there’s a hard limit on the number of things you can set. It’s frustrating to that .1% who exceed it, but for the 99.9% who don’t, it means a more stable experience.
There are some ways around that 100-series-link limit, if you get creative. If there are two shows that always air together (think Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy you can set one manual recurring recording for both, or you can pad a traditional series link by 30 minutes to encompass both shows. DIRECTV does have a very complex logic system of “ands,” “ors,” and “nots” as we describe in this post from 2012, and you can do a lot with shows that are similar in title. For example AALL HOUSE TTITLE CCHANS 229 picks up about 9 different series with “House” in the title, freeing up room on the list for other stuff. You can set unlimited manual, non-recurring recordings by simply pressing the {R} button on your remote. That’s a pretty manual way of doing it but it does work. You can even resort to keeping a spreadsheet of series links to remove in the winter and put back in before the summer.
With a little work it’s possible to get 150 or more series links set up by combining things this way, and as hard as it is to imagine that someone would need more than 100, it’s really difficult to imagine exceeding 150 or 200 consistently. Personally, I love TV but for me, it’s hard to keep the number over 45. But hey, more power to you if you find more to watch than I do.
