[mythtv-users] Inconsistent treatment of starttime/endtime vs runtime

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

    > Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 22:33:12 -0700
    > From: Yeechang Lee <ylee at pobox.com>

    > "I took the speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty
    > minutes. It's about Russia." -Woody Allen

:)

[And if anyone can explain the throwaway line about the spontaneous
combustion of a local merchant that appears in _Crime and Punishment_,
well, that's weirded me out since I tripped over it in high school.
Guess it was just a 19th-cen fad.  Hmm...  and this supports that:
http://www.answers.com/topic/spontaneous-human-combustion-1]

    > As un-ideal as this is, it is a workable solution assuming a) one has
    > multipler tuners and b) no other program category that needs such
    > padding. I've auto-padded all programs categorized as "Sports event"
    > with an extra 30 minutes for years.

Yeah, and I pad -everything- by a few minutes for clock skew and
certain broadcasters (*ahem* Sundance *ahem*) by an ever-increasing
amount because of, well, issues like this.  The problem is one of
diminishing returns---padding every single recording from multiple
different channels by 30 minutes for a bug that only manifests every
couple of months is a terrible waste, and exhausts tuners due to
too much overlap.  It was the insight that runTime actually -told-
me when they were being particularly fast & loose w/scheduling data
that started this whole thing---but sports events don't have a
runTime.  And plenty of broadcasters are just mega-flaky (several
people on this list from Australia have complained that programs just
drift later and later throughout the evening, IIRC).  Those situations
are just hopeless---pad and pad and pad.  I was just hoping I could
solve -this- one, since in my case all the data needed to solve it
was actually coming down the pipe from SD.