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

Mark Kundinger mkundinger at yahoo.com
Thu Sep 29 06:51:21 UTC 2005


It's already been mentioned that the scheduling can often produce
results that the user doesn't expect with current functionality. 
Adding more options would make it even more complex.  However, I
perceive the main benefits of "soft scheduling" to be people who are
tuner-limited.  (If someone has the choice between missing the last 30
seconds of a show, and skipping out entirely on some other program,
then they'll usually want the second recording (unless it's Wink
Martindale)).

Here's what I forsee would be the most flexible, power-usery, and
hardest to understand way of approaching this:

1)  Individual schedules have their "hard" recording time, as they do
now.
2)  There is a global pre-roll time, which works exactly as now.
3)  Conceptually in the middle, there is a "soft" before/after time (in
minutes).  For ease of use, or for Australians, this would be set
globally.

Now, at the same part where the user is specifying the "soft" amounts,
they would also have a "Soft time will change tuner? y/n" and "Soft
time will cause reschedule? y/n"

  a) If the user selects neither option, then the soft time works
exactly as the pre-roll works now, just specified in minutes instead of
seconds.
  b) If the user selects tuner-shifting, but not reschedule, then the
recording will be attempted on a lower-priority tuner in that timeslot
to be able to include the soft time.  If no idle tuners are available,
then it would schedule as now, only recording the "hard" time portion
of the show.
  c) If reschedule is selected, but not tuner, then the program will
attempt to find an earlier/later showing where the preferred tuner is
available.  If it cannot, then it will attempt to record using just the
"hard" time on the preferred tuner, and if that doesn't work, it will
revert to lesser tuners like it would anyway.
  d) If both options were selected, the the scheduler will both try to
shift tuners and times to get all of the soft time recorded.  To be
honest, I don't know which would be first in priority.  Based on
current behavior, I'd guess scheduling-changing would be tried first. 
Anyway, recording just the "hard" time would still be an option.

Then, if you really, really, wanted to kick it up a notch, you could
make it so that the soft over/under times could be stored per recording
schedule, right next to where the hard over/under times are stored. 
Then the user could vary that by program for the ultimate flexibility. 
However, it would still be extremely to set the default amount either
globally or per recording profile, just to avoid specifying a soft
amount evey time a recording is made.

... I dunno, sounds like a lot of work?  I can see it helping out my
own tv-watching, but only rarely.  Kind of like swatting a fly with a
bulldozer.



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