[mythtv-users] is mythtv smart enough to do this (overlap/back-to-back) with recordings?

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Fri Jul 28 08:31:27 UTC 2006


On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 08:04:42PM +1200, Steve Hodge wrote:
> On 7/28/06, Kevin Kuphal <kuphal at dls.net> wrote:
> > And without changing anything, Myth *will* record all your shows back to
> > back with one card.  The problem is that people make changes and tell
> > Myth to record a little extra and then are surprised when it bumps
> > things to do exactly what you asked it to do.
> 
> The problem is that the EPG data is not accurate enough. If programs
> really ran to the times that the EPG said then everything would be
> wonderful. But they don't. So people have to pad their recording
> schedules or they will not get all of the shows they are asking for.
> Are you suggesting people are wrong to do that? Are you saying you
> never do?
> 
> So they pad, and then a schedule change puts the program from
> recording schedule A next to the program from recording schedule B and
> one of them doesn't get recorded. To expect users to foresee that
> happening is asking too much, IMHO. And it means constant vigilence of
> upcomming recordings, occassionally having to manually tweek the
> schedules, and sometimes having to remember that recording A has part
> of recording B on it. Surely you can't be arguing that is perfectly
> fine behaviour for Myth to exhibit when there's no technical reason
> for it?

I think in general that when most people add padding, they don't
mean "and don't record another show I asked for if it would interfere
with the padding."    They might mean that sometimes, but I suspect
they mean, "pad if you can" most of the time and only rarely
"pad, and damn the torpedoes."

Now in some cases, the show is on again later, and so you can pad
and get both shows.   In other cases, the other show is on the
same channel, and there are many suggestions for how to do that well.

But I think a good rule is "If I asked for a show, try as hard as you
can to record that show" is a good philosophy.   Which, by the way,
would mean that if a user said, "pad to the exclusion of all else"
but only for a few minutes, then we would still record 58 minutes of
the one hour show that was a "conflict" with the padding.

The goal is always don't surprise the user, especially a nasty negative
surprise like not getting their show.   Missing the first few minutes
is a bad surprise but not like losing the whole thing.

Now for the truly anal, the right interface might be to have a different
recording priority for the padding, so that the system can decide
between padding and a show that conflicts with the padding.  But
that's way too complex.

I have always found Myth to be a bit lacking in dealing with conflicts.
Unlike the Tivo, which perhaps warns you too much about conflicts, Myth
just lets them happen, though you can browse the upcoming scheduled
recordings list to discover them if you go looking.   Mythweb has started
to be more proactive about warnign about conflicts and it's a good step.

One simple step might be a status indicator that says "You've got 3 conflicts"
and takes you do the scheduling screen to see what they are.  
(In a clever interface, you could go to a conflict and say, "don't tell
me of this one any more.")

One place Tivo is right is if you schedule a show and it won't actually
ever record because of conflicts, that should cause an error.   If
you record a show at higher priority and it conflicts with others shows,
again it would be nice to be told that, though Tivo's one-by-one confirmation
may be too much.

Of course, some of these things are more code than others.

(By "conflict" here I mean one that results in no recording of a
requested show.   Some might like it to mean one that delays a show by
some longer period of time, but that's going a bit too far.)


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