[mythtv-users] Tour de France

Bruce Markey bjm at lvcm.com
Mon Jun 27 20:05:58 UTC 2005


A couple years ago I decided to record a bit of the Tour day
Lance to see what all the fuss was about. I'm now hooked on
this very tactical sport. Beginning this weekend, Lance Armstrong
will be going after his unprecedented seventh straight win in
the last race of his career. Once again the Outdoor Life Network
will have something like live coverage of the entire race. All
you have to do is wake up by 5:30am PDT and stare at the TV for
six hours every day for a month... or use a DVR to fast forward
through it at your own pace.

OLN has a long version early in the morning where they start off
delayed and have compressed highlights of the early hours then
catch up with live events or something like that. They then edit
it down to a shorter version and repeat the short version four or
five times per day. OLN essentially becomes the Tour de France
channel during July.

For each stage/day the same subtitle and description is used for
the live and edited version but the live versions have different
programids than the replays. This means that if you set a Channel
or All record rule, you would get the long plus one short version
each day. This suggests two strategies; get all of the live or
flexibly grab any one of the replays.

To get the live versions only, go to the Custom Record page and
create a rule like this:

program.title = "Bicycle Racing"
AND HOUR(program.starttime) < 8

For EDT, change the 8 to 11 (other timezones should know what to do =).
You can cut'n'paste this or create it with "Match an exact title"
and "Not in primetime" then edit. Either way, click the "Record"
button to set options.

As I recall the live versions can sometimes run over so it's
probably a good idea to add an extra half hour or so. You may also
want to use a lower resolution recording profile because the image
quality from an antenna on a moving motorcycle with a hand held
camera from half way around the world isn't exactly IMAX.

The other approach would be to change the "<" to ">" which will
then choose from any of the edited rebroadcasts. In that case,
you shouldn't need extra time on the end and should probably set
the priority very low so the scheduler can choose a showing that
doesn't conflict with anything else.

--  bjm



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