[mythtv-users] How to make "Record this program in This Timeslot every ..." more tolerant to late arrival EPG changes ?

Michael Watson michael at thewatsonfamily.id.au
Thu Sep 8 13:41:14 UTC 2011


> On Tue, 6 Sep 2011, Bart Delva wrote:
>
> [snip]
>> Apparantly in Belgium the main broadcaster is changing the EPG rather
>> frequently during the day.
> Two reasons spring to mind.  The system is run by people who do not
> know what they are doing, or it is run by people who know what they
> are doing and circumstances have changed.  Either way the best that
> you can hope for is a robust failure mode.
>
>> If I make a schedule to record a daily show using
>> the "in this timeslot" option for a show that starts at 6h30pm and it gets
>> rescheduled to 6h31 the show does not get recorded at all.
> None of the recording options do quite what you would expect.
> MythTV is very clever, but sometimes surprising.
>
> Read the instructions.  :-(  Or think of am improvement to the
> user interface, and then convince a programmer to implement it.
>
>> I was thinking to use the Find and record one showing of this title every
>> day, but then it will only record the repeat episode which gets broadcasted
>> around noon (yes they use same description and title) . Record at any time
>> results in 4 recordings per day (they love repeating in Belgium) .
I use "Record at any time on any channel" and set Duplicate Method to 
"Match Duplicates using Subtitle and Description" and Duplicate Scope to 
"Look for duplicates in current recordings".   This way, it should only 
record the show once, but it may not be at the 6:30 time slot you 
desire.  Increasing the priority may make it record the earliest show 
(not sure on this though)

> Repeats are cheap.
>
>> A great way to solve this would be a parameter that allows some tolerance to
>> this timeslot for example 5 minutes, so that if a program would change to a
>> 5 minutes earlier or a 5 minutes later airing, it would still be recorded
>> and not simply ignored as happens now.
> I have been pondering similar issues.
>
> I would like to suggest either renaming record timeslot or using a
> different failure mode for when the EPG data changes.
>
> Most comprehensible would be if record this timeslot actually recorded
> a timeslot.  i.e.  If the user selected a program listed as 6:30 to
> 7:00 then record from 6:30 to 7:00 even if the EPG changes.  Afterwards
> label it with whatever happened to be broadcast.  There would be a
> bonus of no extra load on the scheduler.
>
> If only I could think of a better name, I'd type it here...  suggestions
> welcome.
>
> Apparently it is possible to do things with MythWeb or custom rules, but I
> am not expert in either.
>
> Find daily will assume that the episode that you click on is the main
> episode of the day.  So click on the 6:30 entry and it should find one
> per day in the 6:30 to 6:30 window.  BUT it will be confused by EIT
> jitter.  I suspect that this could be improved by actually using a window
> of a bit before 6:30 to a bit before 6:30.  Now, think of an interesting
> value or algorithm for, "a bit before".
>
>> Does this exist ? Any ideas ?
> Many ideas, but not all of them are sensible.  :-(
>
>> Thx, Bart.



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