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

Hamish Moffatt hamish at cloud.net.au
Thu Sep 29 23:03:55 UTC 2005


On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 05:48:37PM -0500, David Engel wrote:
> I know this is going to piss off some people, but here is what I now
> intend to do.
> 
> 1. Table any changes which add soft scheduling for the time being.
> 
> 2. Add default start-early and end-late settings for new recording
>    rules.  Existing rules will have to be edited if wanted.
> 
> 3. Limit the existing pre-roll and post-roll settings to 30 seconds
>    maximum.
> 
> 4. After 3 or 4 weeks, re-open this discussion.  Hopefully by then,
>    the big soft scheduling proponents will have real world experience
>    with the above changes and how much of a problem there still is.

Is #3 particularly useful/necessary?

Australian television stations are appalling for running late. One
station in particular routinely runs 15-20 minutes late due to live
reality television programs (even though they know this always happen
and could schedule for it).

I'm abusing post-roll by setting it to 20 minutes. This works as poor
man's soft scheduling so far. In my case I could put a hard 20 minutes
on every program as I have three tuners and would probably never get a
conflict. Currently my third tuner only does about 1 hour a week.

However, most Australian users would not (we only have 5 OTA stations 
so 3 tuners is excessive); hard extra time would cause conflicts, while
post-roll allows for best effort. Programs are rarely repeated here
so a conflict is a missed program.

Of course I'm really arguing for the soft scheduler, which would be
great for Australians. (I've even glanced at the scheduler code in the 
past but found it a bit daunting to start working on this though.) 
However I think your interim solution would actually make things worse.

Regards,
Hamish
-- 
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish at debian.org> <hamish at cloud.net.au>


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