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

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Mon Jul 31 02:31:09 UTC 2006


On Sun, Jul 30, 2006 at 06:03:18PM -0700, chris at cpr.homelinux.net wrote:
> Collaboration is great when you don't know what the show is going 
> to be like, but in this case you've already determined that the end 
> of "60 Minutes" is crap and the beginning of "Simpsons" is golden.  
> You don't need a group to tell you what to do to fix that.  :-)

That's why a small web page db app, with a human moderator to deal with
conflicts, would solve this nicely.    Get a list of shows, let
people record information on the value of their start and end -- or
even necessary padding for network shows.   Have a moderator remove
any sabotage, and make a file you can download from time to time which
can be used by the scheduler.

Each individual should not have to figure this out and configure it
for themselves, when all it takes is one person to configure it.

You might disagree with the info coming down of course, but you can
always modify things manually.  But you shouldn't have to, 99.9% of
the time.

> I use priorities extensively (including down-grading TVWish 
> suggestions) and don't find the interface too much of a problem, 
> although the way the priorities are applied is far too simplistic.  
> With a little creativity it could be much more intelligent.

As I said, I know that people use them, but I bet that ordinary users
use them quite sparingly.   But I'm thinking of a much broader class
of user, like Tivo users, most of whom probably barely understand
the season pass manager (which did not even exist in version 1 of
their software.)

> I checked my schedule just for laughs.  Out of 52 shows in the next 
> 14 days that I would like to record, only two occur back-to-back on 
> the same channel.  Two other pairs are back-to-back on different 
> channels, and the remaining 46 are non-sequential.  A sample size 
> of one has no statistical significance, of course...

Indeed.  Often the adjacent shows are related.  Daily Show and
Colbert Report, Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, etc.

But the reason there is all this traffic on the topic is that
to most people, the idea that you ask it to record two shows, and
you ask for padding, and the two shows end up adjacent on the
same channel and the result is you miss one of them entirely -- well it
seems shockingly wrong.    Much more wrong than getting one show
on the wrong tuner.

BTW, I was surprised to learn of the wrong tuner problem being a major
one.  While I have a DTV tuner and a PVR-250 for analog, it would not
be good for me to ask to record shows on the "best" tuner.   When
I want HDTV, I want HDTV.    However, in the USA the stations are
all broadcasting SDTV shows upsampled to HD, so if I asked for an
SD show, and got it on the "best" tuner, I would get a file 4x larger
than I want -- though admittedly of better quality, so that I sometimes
do it if I know I will watch and delete soon.   And several of the
stations have SDTV subchannels, which are good, but not HD.   As yet,
Myth does not have a priority bump for actually being in HD, which 
would help here.   Not too hard to add, though.     Right now you
can't easily express how to get the best results out of this situation.

It's not an easy problem.  But you want to avoid the truly nasty
surprises, of the "You didn't get that show, and there's no physical
reason you couldn't have" sort.   "You got that show in SD" is also a
bad surprise to be avoided, but not as nasty.   Many of these things
are solved if the system is able to warn you when it's not going to
be able to do what you asked -- so long as you design it so the warnings
don't become so frequent as to be noise.



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