Adding/editing timer to one time (manual) recording from Kodi guide has no effect

[mmortal03]

I'm running into what seems to be a bug, where adding or editing a timer from the Kodi guide interface to be a "One time (manual)" type has no effect; that is, once I click OK to create or edit the timer, it still remains a guide recording with none of the manual modifications saved.

I can make a video of the process if need be, but this is pretty straightforward to reproduce:

In Kodi (v21, on Windows), navigate to TV->Guide and click on an upcoming show. Then click the "Add timer" button. Change the Type to "One time (manual)". Change the end time to, say, 30 minutes longer than what is pre-filled. Click OK to create the timer. Now go back one screen, and click on Timers. Find the timer that was just created and click on it.  Note that the Type is not "One time (manual)", but "One time (guide)", meaning the manually edited extended time entered will not be recorded, but, instead, it will just default to whatever is in the guide. If you try editing the Type here and changing the end time and clicking OK, the timer still doesn't get edited. It remains a "One time (guide)" recording.

I noticed this happening in practice today because I wanted to record a sports program from the guide, but wanted to enter a manually extended amount of time (a few additional hours). Unfortunately, because of the bug, these manual modifications were ignored and it ended up just recording the program for the guide's length of time. 

I understand workarounds might be to set some default padding that is significantly extended across all recordings, or to remember to record all the following programs in a row, but those are obviously just workarounds.

[mvallevand]

It is easier if you send the debug Kod and zipped NextPVR logs

Martin

[mmortal03]

Attached. 

I've used "The Good Doctor" as the example show. The Kodi log is from a freshly installed instance of Kodi, basically on a fresh computer.

 The debug lines starting at this point jumped out at me in the Kodi log:

Code:

2024-06-23 23:51:13.504 T:15180   debug <CSettingsManager>: requested setting (timer.type) was not found.

[mvallevand]

Thanks. After looking at the logs I think I understand what you are trying to do. You want a manual recording but NextPVR is turning it into an EPG based recording. Assuming you are doing this to allow two recordings without duplicate checking you need to change the name on the manual recording to not match the name that you schedule, ie "The Good Doctor Backup"

This is a NextPVR feature and it happens in web scheduling too. By renaming you lose the metadata, including S/E it will be recorded with the new name and it won't be merged with your other recordings so it truly is a manual generic recording.

Also you can ignore that red-herring in the log.

Martin

[mmortal03]

That makes sense programmatically. I'll have to try to remember to do that. To give you more context, the general reason I'm wanting to do it is on sports events, where the pre-filled guide info is mostly accurate (i.e. the channel, program name, and start time will all be correct) but because sports events will often go significantly longer than the official guide specifies, I want to go in there and just add a few hours to the end. I only noticed this recently that editing these for extended time wasn't actually recording the extended time!

Since the backend logic does, as you described, depend on using the program name as a unique identifier for checking for duplicates, here's an idea:

What if, whenever a user changes the Timer type in Kodi to a manual recording, you could have the add-on automatically append the string " (manual)" to the end of the program name in the Kodi UI there, and make the appended part non-editable? I don't know if that's even possible from a Kodi PVR add-on perspective, but doing that would at least result in fewer people's programs not recording for their manually entered durations. Some people might still question why " (manual)" is getting appended to the name, but it would act more intuitively that way (because they selected a manual recording type!)

[mvallevand]

Since I am not sure I agree with NextPVR's logic I considered offering a solution like yours even before I posted but I decided it still is better to have manual recordings work the same in Kodi as they do in all clients.

Martin

[mmortal03]

Since I am not sure I agree with NextPVR's logic I considered offering a solution like yours even before I posted but I decided it still is better to have manual recordings work the same in Kodi as they do in all clients.

Martin

I understand. I'm imagining it'd need to be a custom setting that is disabled by default, unless, like you said, something generalizable could be done on the Kodi side.