Scheduled Season Recordings questions

[psycik]

Sub does the out of the box recording service handle duplicates from our part of the world??

So if I set something to record currently I say only record on this day at this time. If I said, record whenever you like will it skip it if it's already been done??

And as a follow on to do working this way, if say I had two recording set to record all day every day - both duplicated more than once, and say on the first instance it gets a conflict, will one of the recordings say "oh, that ok, you record now, I'll come up later".

I'm guessing not, as I imagine the coding for this would be pretty disgusting.

[gEd]

AFAIK, only zapit users get to avoid conflicts as each show has a unique hash value that can be checked by gbpvr.

I did ask Sub some time ago about doing this for us non-zapit users so that gbpvr could detect duplicates based on title AND subtitle but it's a no-goer as many shows (e.g. The News) would fail unintentionally.

However, I think that xrecord/cdk scheduler has the ability to avoid (non zapit) duplicates but I have not investigated it.

[sub]

Sub does the out of the box recording service handle duplicates from our part of the world??

No it doesnt. The only part of the world it'll do it for is the US since zap2it is the only EPG source that provides dedicated information to identify a show uniquely.

Some have suggested using the show title + subtitle + description in the past for doing this with other EPG sources, but the reality is that the quality of this information is too unreliable. The validity of this would vary between countries and channels and even programs. Based on the listings we get through TVNZ and Sky's website via xmltvnz, it work for many of the TV1 and TV2 shows, except for a few types of shows like news and current affairs, and then only with a splattering of shows from the Sky channels (prime etc). Like news and current affairs, you'll find many shows just have very generic listing details used for every airing.

In theory to could knock up something to selectively add the (currently loaded if present) <unique-identifier> tag in the XMLTV file for certain shows, and GB-PVR would use it.

[sub]

What he said...

[sub]

Some examples of these types of descriptions from a mixture of channels:

Antiques Roadshow: As well as the antiques and their history, the series reveals remarkable human interest stories which emerge as the owners explain how the articles came into their possession.

The Great Outdoors: Join Ernie Dingo and his team of travellers as they seek out and experience world's best holiday destinations, for all tastes and all budgets.

Location Location: This popular series follows the exciting and tense journey of potential home buyers as they hunt for the best property

The Simpsons: The Simpsons

Deal Or No Deal: Game show hosted by Andrew O'Keefe that gives contestants the opportunity to win up to $200,000 each night.

World's Most Amazing Videos: Rare footage of some of the most heart-pounding and unbelievable moments ever captured on film.

Prime News: Live from Prime's Albany studio with Eric Young, Suzy Clarkson and Kelly Swanson-Roe, news from home and around the world plus sport and a full weather wrap with updates through the night.

...etc...

These sorts of descriptions easily out number shows with good descriptions. Ok, these generic descriptions tend to be used on repeats or crap shows, but GB-PVR has no way to differentiate which are which, so this logic couldnt really work here.

You'd need to have some logic that used a white-list file identifying shows with good info, which then generates the unique id in the XMLTV file.

[gEd]

What he said...

Too slow...

[psycik]

ok, that's cool, I tend to micromanage my recordings to avoid duplicates, was wondering if the dupes checking was there if it would do it for me.....no biggie.

[sub]

The duplicates bug me on season recordings my wife makes on channels like the Living Channel etc, where they repeat stuff alot. Recordings on big channels like TV1, TV2 etc fair much better, with repeats very rarely played.

[psycik]

Yeah I suppose, I just got the wife to follow the same rules as me, no recording stuff off TCL during the day (as we're using the decoder)

And their descriptions aren't great. MTV is worse!! At least most of the other channels it's on a couple of times a day so you're fairly sure a weekly will work, MTV puts programs on different days different times and they're all the same!!

I suppose another option is using the Search Episode to find a program, then make it so that you can "jump" to the guide for that particular time then you can very quickly see if there are conflicts.

I guess the last option is MORE TUNERS!!!

[gEd]

Some examples of these types of descriptions from a mixture of channels:

Tis definitely true that many generic shows always have the same description but perhaps these shows do not have an episode name?

e.g. All the Simpsons shows in my EPG have an associated episode name and unique description for that episode.

Could you perhaps check for dups based on episode name AND desc. but only if the episode name exists. (as an option on season recordings)?

[Apologies if I'm just going over well trodden ground, it's just that having recorded all 26 episodes of "The World at War", each episode of which was shown 4 times, it remains a subject close to my heart!]