NPVR/GBPVR and padding.

[johnsonx42]

My complaint with padding has always been that there was no way to force padding, nor any way to set negative padding. The answer to such things has always been "well just use manual recording then" which I find to be a completely useless solution.

Here's two scenarios to illustrate the matter:

1. Forced or 'hard' padding: I want to record a live event; said live event is known to run long, so I add 30 minutes of padding. Obviously I REALLY want it to add the 30 minutes. I don't care if there's some other show to be recorded. If having to choose hard or soft padding each time is a bit much, then it seems logical to just assume that padding explicitly added to a single recording is meant to be hard padding (really, why would the user add padding to a single recording unless that's what they want?); all automatically added padding could be presumed to be soft padding.

2. Negative padding: some shows annoyingly end a minute late, like from 9:00pm to 10:01pm. This then prevents recording another show that starts at 10:00pm; I'd like to be able to specify a negative 1 minute beginning pad to the later show, rather than just missing it completely (or conversely, if I decide I care less about the final minute of the prior show, set a negative 1 minute end pad to it). I guess negative padding should always be considered soft padding - it only shortens the recording when it has to.

[roy]

I'm just hoping this will be resolved in the next release.

[griffy]

We are luck/unlucky here in New Zealand that FTA DVB-T TV is on 3 mux's so with 3 tuners set exclusively to one mux each (disable channels from other mux) and multi all channels can be recorded at once, with padding to all recording been recorded (just requires 3 tuner cards of course)
I then use a 4th DVB-S card for SKY Paid TV

[mvallevand]

I am not sure there if there is a padding problem. I see it that NPVR is not using the best tuner. Back-to-back recordings on the same digital channel should try to stay on the same digital tuner to allow full padding with multi-rec When the same channel is not being used it should try to use all tuners as opposed to having idle tuners. When back-to-back analog recordings are required and there are no available tuners, the same tuner should be used for recording the same channel, to minimize gaps.

Martin

[roy]

I am not sure there if there is a padding problem.

For me, padding is never honored for analog tuners when one recording starts at the same time another ends, even when multiple tuners are available.

I have 6 analog tuners. I record the baseball game every night that ends at 10 pm, with 90 mins post padding. If another analog recording starts at 10 pm, it uses that same first tuner, every time, when there may be 5 others available. The baseball game still shows as recording until the end of the padding, but it has stopped.

[johnsonx42]

I believe Martin is saying that the problem is not the padding logic per se, but tuner allocation logic in general. Fix the overall tuner allocation logic, and the padding will work better too.

Roy, what you've identified is clearly a bug, straight up. It says it's recording something that it isn't.

Obviously 2.0.3 is done, there'll be no more patches for it. Hopefully sub has some fixes in the code for 2.1.x or whatever it's to be called.