Overrunning Programs

[hansol123]

I set GBPVR to record the Tudors on BBC1 for my wife last night as for some strange reason she wanted to keep it.

Sods law it started 13 minutes late because of the athletics but our Sky box detected the change of time and recorded the programme.

Is there any way that GBPVR can detect time changes for programs set using the Radio Times and XMLTV.

I presume the BBC sends out a signal that is detected by the Sky HD box or perhaps the EPG is updated.

Thanks for your help.

[sub]

Is there any way that GBPVR can detect time changes for programs set using the Radio Times and XMLTV.

If it was a season recording, it'd have picked up changes to the times as at the last update of the EPG. If the time changed after that, then the app is not going to know about it.

[hansol123]

Sorry did you mean to say that the app will not know about the last minute change ???

[sub]

Yes. I've added the 'not' to my post.

[Reddwarf]

Sods law it started 13 minutes late because of the athletics but our Sky box detected the change of time and recorded the programme.

Are you sure the box actually detected the change? Most shows are followed by 10-15 min of commercials and gbpvr normally records until 2 min into the next show according to the EPG. That's what saves my recordings very often on one of the channels I frequently record, they are notorious late a lot of the time.

It would have been nice thou, if gbpvr at the start of a recording could check the fresh EPG to see if the show has been delayed and increase the recording time accordingly.

[martint123]

Most shows are followed by 10-15 min of commercials

Thankfully the UK has not got that bad yet - and no commercials at all on BBC1, other than upcoming shows.

I don't have Sky+ to know if it dynamically updates the EPG. Terrestrial used to have PDC that transmitted start and stop information that could be used by VCR's but I never had much success with that.

I suspect the advertisers have made sure no info like this is made available in digital channels to ensure their ads are recorded!

[Reddwarf]

I suspect the advertisers have made sure no info like this is made available in digital channels to ensure their ads are recorded!

I can imagine that, yes

[Pob]

Freesat+, Sky+, and Freeview+ recorders will all change the recording times of programmes IF the broadcaster sends out a message to the recorder. It's certainly not 100% reliable, many forum threads about the broadcaster failing to send out the message, and the system does not cope with programmes jumping channels (as they did during Wimbledon), and then there is the question of what happens if you have another recording scheduled for the original end time, on another channel...
I guess the nearest we could get would be to run XMLTVgui every few minutes - not very practicle due to the time it takes to download and read the XMLTV files! It does though raise the question about what form these broadcast messages are in, and if GBPVR could listen out and respond to them? But we are fortunate having the web interface, as even away from home we can add some extra padding to a recording so long as we know about the over-run...

[Reddwarf]

Scheduled changes is not the biggers problem if one updates the XMLTV every day (automated), but last-minute-changes can often be a problem. For those channels with DVB-EPG it might be possible to monitor the epg for that channel? Or does it take too much recources?

[sub]

Scheduled changes is not the biggers problem if one updates the XMLTV every day (automated), but last-minute-changes can often be a problem. For those channels with DVB-EPG it might be possible to monitor the epg for that channel? Or does it take too much recources?

On a lot of systems, the DVB-EPG doesnt reflect last minute changes, and you often see it show a program name that isnt showing on the screen.