Annoyances caused by sporting events

[BrettB]

The --sunday option is good because I just look for show that are running at 6:35 PM Eastern For the rest of the week it is recording the abutting show or manually. I might add a late news/talk show mode for weeknights

Martin: Did you ever do anything with a "late news/talk show mode for weeknights"? I haven't been using NextEnd, but with the new season beginning, I decided to try it out. And last Thursday, we ended up not getting much of "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" because the NFL Football game during prime-time ran late. So, I would definitely benefit from such an option. Actually, is there any reason why the instance getting run from the PostUpdateEPG.bat file couldn't just check to see if there were ANY monitored sports events scheduled that day with additional recordings scheduled after them--and if so, invoke the logic currently used by the --Sunday option?

[mvallevand]

The logic for late night is a little different then Sunday because of the 11pm news which makes it a nuisance to test but I don't mind putting something up there to try. I could probably fire something that kicks in at 11pm and if sports is still one I could extend 11:30-12:30 shows.

Martin

[BrettB]

The logic for late night is a little different then Sunday because of the 11pm news which makes it a nuisance to test but I don't mind putting something up there to try. I could probably fire something that kicks in at 11pm and if sports is still one I could extend 11:30-12:30 shows.

I'm up for testing whatever you come up with. While you're thinking about it, though, here are a few more items to consider:

1. I'm in the US Central Timezone.
   
2. Our local CBS news normally runs from 10:00pm to 10:35pm. And then Stephen Colbert goes from 10:35pm to 11:37pm. (Who knows why...)
   
3. On Thursday nights with NFL Football, now, the Football is scheduled to go until 10:15pm. Then local news from 10:15pm to 10:50pm. And finally, Colbert from 10:50pm to 11:52pm.
   
4. I'm not currently trying to record "The Late Late Show with James Corden" after Colbert, but it would be good if a solution would also work for that. (It's scheduled for the exact hour following when Colbert is scheduled. I'm happy to set it to record for a bit for testing.)
   

I'm not sure how exact your timings are (i.e. when you say "11pm news" and "11:30-12:30 shows"), but with these variances on Thursday night, I'm thinking that the solution needs to somehow be "scheduled guide based." Hence, I was thinking that maybe you could do a more generic solution that would work for both Sunday and weeknights which would be invoked by the PostUpdateEPG batch file (where there is currently the --Sunday option replace with something like --ExtendPostEventRecordings). Then it would:

1. Look for any applicable EPG entries (i.e. "NFL Football", etc.) on the current day.
   
2. If an event is found, the check to see if there are any scheduled recordings on the same channel beginning after the end of the event.
   
3. If so, then monitor the event for running long beginning at the originally scheduled end time.
   
4. If the event runs long, then set it up so that any recordings later in the "day" would go ahead and start at the originally scheduled time, set a resume point at the "expected/delayed show start time" (if --resume was specified), and extend the post-padding/ending time by the amount of the run-over.
   
5. The "day" would probably need to go until something like 2am local time the next day to be able to catch that 2nd set of late-night talk shows.
   

[rkulagow]

[*]Our local CBS news normally runs from 10:00pm to 10:35pm. And then Stephen Colbert goes from 10:35pm to 11:37pm. (Who knows why...)
[/LIST]

To ensure that if you don't have enough tuners, and there's a competing show on another channel that starts at 11:36, then that means that your tuners are busy until 11:37, so therefore there are no free tuners at 11:36, so that other program doesn't get recorded.

[ww4397]

Great idea. We record lots of sports and "when do they end" is always a guessing game. Our practice has been to post-pad 89 minutes and keep our fingers crossed. But that yields some gigantic files. Really like the idea of ending the recording before the scheduled end time if the game finishes early, too.

Does this utility work for all sports or just certain ones? For example, does it work for tennis?

[mvallevand]

Great idea. We record lots of sports and "when do they end" is always a guessing game. Our practice has been to post-pad 89 minutes and keep our fingers crossed. But that yields some gigantic files. Really like the idea of ending the recording before the scheduled end time if the game finishes early, too.

Does this utility work for all sports or just certain ones? For example, does it work for tennis?

Not tennis and only in North America potentially only with Schedules Direct. Monitored sports are here http://www.livepvrdata.com/events.jsp

Martin

[ww4397]

NHL? It is right around the corner!

[mvallevand]

NHL? It is right around the corner!

Ottawa Toronto on TSN pre-season tomorrow night. The season is far too long.

Martin

[BrettB]

The logic for late night is a little different then Sunday because of the 11pm news which makes it a nuisance to test but I don't mind putting something up there to try. I could probably fire something that kicks in at 11pm and if sports is still one I could extend 11:30-12:30 shows.

Martin: Good news--NextEnd worked to extend Stephen Colbert for me last night. (See the attached logs.) However, I think that it only worked because the football game ran 40 minutes late so it was still playing when the Colbert recording began. If I'm understanding correctly how things work, if it had only been 20 minutes late (so just into the late news schedule), then I don't think Colbert would have extended. :-(

Also, one other question/anomaly: I used the --resume option on the NextEnd command line. And it did set a resume point. But why did it set the resume point at 1518 seconds instead of 2418 seconds (since the football game ended 0:40:18 late)? That would have put it almost spot-on to when Colbert started in the recording instead of in the middle of the news where the 1518 point put it.

[mvallevand]

Martin: Good news--NextEnd worked to extend Stephen Colbert for me last night. (See the attached logs.) However, I think that it only worked because the football game ran 40 minutes late so it was still playing when the Colbert recording began. If I'm understanding correctly how things work, if it had only been 20 minutes late (so just into the late news schedule), then I don't think Colbert would have extended. :-(

Right so on Sunday's if you don't want to use the -sunday option record 60 minutes and in your case record the news on Thursdays.

Also, one other question/anomaly: I used the --resume option on the NextEnd command line. And it did set a resume point. But why did it set the resume point at 1518 seconds instead of 2418 seconds (since the football game ended 0:40:18 late)? That would have put it almost spot-on to when Colbert started in the recording instead of in the middle of the news where the 1518 point put it.

I see what I did, this should fix the short resume.

Martin