[mythtv] Re: Re: Ticket #255: Improved scheduling of consecutive programs with pre-roll/overrecord

[Keith Irwin]

On Sep 30, 2005, at 3:22 AM, Rudy Zijlstra wrote:
> Face up to it. Soft scheduling will still result in unexpected  
> behaviour. Spend 50bucks to get an  extra tuner and spare yourself  
> the disappointment.
>
> Regards,
>
> Rudy

It's not that simple for all of us.  I have one tuner for ATSC  
(primarily high definition) digital programming and another for  
analog TV programming off of cable.  Both sometimes have back to back  
recordings.  So I'd need two more tuners.  I can't fit two more  
tuners into my box.  The PCI slots are too tightly spaced to put  
tuner cards with large "tin can" tuners on them into adjacent slots.   
As such, I would need to buy another computer and two tuners.   
Realistically, we're talking about a minimum of $450 (basic computer  
= $300, ATSC tuner = $100, NTSC tuner = $50).  That's significantly  
outside my budget.

As a user, I would just like to say that having a few minutes of soft  
time is very useful to me.  Shows on several networks I watch are  
often literally back to back.  For instance, That Seventies Show has  
jokes during the credit roll.  On FX the next show starts five  
seconds later.  The network's clock is not synchronized with mine to  
that kind of margin of error.  In fact, it's rare that it's  
synchronized to within 30 seconds.  I want to be able to capture the  
whole show.  But I would rather give up a few seconds of the end of a  
show than be unable to record a show due to conflicts.  Setting  
preroll and postroll to a few minutes does this perfectly.  If the  
official version of MythTV goes to a 30-second limit on preroll and  
postroll, I will start patching my own version to avoid this limit.

With soft time, unexpected behavior can occur, yes, but most of the  
time it "does the right thing" without my having to tell it what to  
do and that's invaluable.  Those of you who don't like soft time, - 
don't use it-.  Don't tell the rest of us that we should be happy  
with hard time.  If we wanted hard time, we could set it.  What the  
argument against better soft time support (options such as using a  
second tuner rather than killing the preroll) comes down to is "I  
don't like soft time, so you shouldn't either."  I'm glad for those  
of you who can set your preroll and postrolls to a few seconds and  
not have problems, but I'll miss beginnings and endings if I do  
that.  But excuse me if I don't cry for the fact that I'm abusing a  
feature.  If a significant portion of users are abusing a feature,  
perhaps it's time for the feature to change to accommodate that usage.

Keith Irwin
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-dev/attachments/20051001/79b0d251/PGP.pgp