With hundreds of Cable channels to choose from, it can be very overwhelming to try to find what you want to watch. Moxi, like most DVR’s has some excellent features that let you not only find the shows you are specifically looking for, but find other shows that might be of interest to you. Read on for some information on searching as well as some “deeper” functions that you may not be aware of…

Hopefully, you are familiar with Moxi’s “navigation” controls. You should be able to bring up the Moxi menu, scroll left and right through the different categories, and scroll up and down through the different category choices. In addition to the “Channels” list, you should see several categories like “Sports”, “Movies”, “Kids”, etc. These are the groupings that Moxi uses to give you quick access browse through these basic categories of shows. Like the “Channels” list, these categories show you what is currently airing now using a format similar to the “Channels” list including the “On Next” pane. Because these screens are more for “browsing”, it can be tedious to find a specific show, especially if it is not airing now. To do more targeted searching, Moxi offers three simple, yet powerful tools: “Find By Title”, “Find By Keyword”, and “Find By Category”. Each has its specific use, so here’s a brief rundown of Moxi’s various search tools:

The first thing you need to do is to navigate to moxi’s “Find & Record” section. Press the Moxi button to bring up the Moxi menu. Scroll left or right until the “Find & Record” category is highlighted. From there, scroll up or down to highlight any of the following choices:

Find By Title
This first method of searching is pretty simple. Say you know the title you are looking for, but just don’t know when it’s airing. Selecting “Find By Title” brings up an on-screen keyboard on the left side of the screen. You use the remote to enter the letters either by moving around the keyboard with the arrows and pressing OK on each letter, or you can use the remote number pad to enter the letters directly “phone pad” style. (Pressing “0” (zero) twice adds a space, and pressing “1” and “OK” backspaces.) Don’t worry about case.

As you enter the letters of the title, Moxi displays the search results in the pane on the left of the screen, narrowing down the list as each letter is typed. If the show you are looking for is in the current channel guide data, which holds about two weeks of upcoming shows, the show will display in the left pane. Press the left arrow to move over to the left pane and scroll up or down to highlight the desired show. Pressing OK will bring up the standard controls to either watch the show if it’s currently airing, or record the current or upcoming shows.

“Find By Title” is an excellent way to find a specific show or to select a bunch of episodes to record without having to set up a series recording.

Find By Keyword
This second method of searching takes the “Find By Title” concept a bit farther by letting you search through not only the titles, but the cast members, and words in the show’s descriptions. For example, say you can’t remember the title of a movie, but you remembered that “HARRISON FORD” was in it. Just select “Find By Keyword” and like the “Find By Title” screen, a keyboard will display on the right side of the screen. Enter the keywords you want to search for, in this case, HARRISON FORD. When finished, press the left arrow to close the keyboard and highlight the results pane. Unlike “Find By Title”, this is not an “as-you-type” search. There will be a brief pause as Moxi searches through all its data for your keywords. Once the search is complete, you can scroll through any results and view or schedule upcoming shows to record.

One small caveat about “Find By Keyword” is that you cannot save the search results nor can you schedule recordings based on keywords. You can only record shows that display in the results pane. For most users, this is a non-issue, but if you are ReplayTV (and possibly TiVo) user, this is a missed feature. None-the-less, “Find By Keyword” searching can be very powerful.

Find By Category
This last search method is for those times when you are looking for something to record, but don’t specifically know the title or show details. It’s similar to the Category browsing described above, but it goes much deeper. Selecting “Find By Category” brings up a horizontal group of major categories like “Movies”, Sports”, etc. with the individual shows displayed vertically under the highlighted category. Again, this is similar to Categories described above, but with two main differences:

First, the shows that are listed are not just those shows airing now, but all shows in that particular category airing in the next two weeks listed alphabetically. Again, this is designed so that you really don’t need to be concerned with when the show is airing, just that it is airing. Select the show to record, and when it airs, it will record.

The second difference is that in each vertical list, there is an entry labeled “More”. Select this, and Moxi displays more detailed sub-categories on the horizontal. You can drill down into these very specific categories to further narrow down those shows to browse.

ReplayTV “Zones” users will be at home here, but again, be aware that you cannot set up recordings based on these categories like you could with Zones, just record the individual shows or show series.

I hope that you find these search tools useful. Moxi, like most DVR’s, offers pwerful tools that the casual user may not know exist. So have fun and start finding shows!!