[mythtv-users] Others experience with LIRC and Atisys200L

Michael Hill mikehillny at yahoo.com
Mon Apr 14 16:40:35 UTC 2003


Isaac Richards wrote:
...
> It's slightly more complicated than that.

I stand corrected. I guess I always choose single record when
testing the scheduler.

> Higher priority recordings are selected over lower (ie, the order on the 
> screen that lets you select the recording type is the priority -- a single 
> one-time recording is the highest priority and an any-time & any-channel 
> recording is the lowest priority).  Then, if the two conflicting shows are 
> the same type, it'll choose the one that starts first.  If they both start at 
> the same time, it'll choose the longer show.  _Then_, finally, If they're 
> both the same length, it'll choose the lower channel id over the higher.  Of 
> course, the manual conflict resolution overrides all that.

This reads like the ReplayTV 5000 User's Guide page 43. Does
a Show-based or Single-record channel Non-guaranteed beat a
full house? My head hurts =). Their approach lead to bankruptcy
court. An approach that is proven to be more profitable is to
allow the user to sort the record list based on their actual
preference rather than leaving it for an algorithm to guess.

When I add things to 'record' I already know that I prefer
"Nova" over "Bowling for Dollars". I want to let the system
know this. I want to to catch every episode of "Survivor"
even if it gets moved to Wednesday or if there is a special
one time episode of "That 70's Show" on a Thursday.

This can be done easily by adding a preference column to the
record table and presenting the record list in the GUI to
allow the user to sort the order according to their own
preference (by easy, of course, I mean I hope to convince
you to crank this out in a day or two rather than me
struggling with the details for weeks ;-).

With a unique value for each item in the record table, the
scheduler can then simply choose higher over lower and
doesn't need to consider type, starttime, length or channel
number. The default choices should then be what the user
would want even if some shows' schedules unexpectedly change
and the user didn't know she needed to look for manual
conflict resolution.

Another advantage of this approach with multibackend is that
as slaves come and go from the pool (intentionally or not ;-),
you can be sure that your favorite show will record even if
you are down to only one tuner. Your fourth overlapping
preference will only get recorded if there are four tuners
available. Also, if you have a preferred tuner due to
signal quality, system resources, disk space or whatever,
your most preferred show will get the 'best' tuner.

Even without preference values, it may be a good idea to
show the record table items in the GUI. The "i" key should
again allow the user to change types or remove the selected
item on this list.

--  bjm






More information about the mythtv-users mailing list