[mythtv-users] How MythTV impressed me THIS week....

Bruce Markey bjm at lvcm.com
Fri Feb 13 20:17:03 EST 2004


Jason Donahue wrote:
> So, Now that I've got my Myth box running pretty stable, my g/f and I
> have scheduled numerous shows to be recorded. I have Enterprise
> scheduled, with the highest possible priority so it will always get
> recorded...
> 
> My g/f scheduled a show that conflicted with Enterprise....and HER SHOW
> got recorded. So after saying "What the hell???" I looked at the program
> guide to see what the problem was.
> 
> It seems MythTV was smart enough to see that the same Enterprise episode
> would re-air on Sunday, so it made the judgement call to record the
> other show, and get Enterprise on Sunday..
> 
> BRAVO, MythTV averted an argument over why HER show didn't get recorded.
> I can't proclaim enough how nicely developed this software is!

This is a situation that the commercial DVRs do not handle well
and do not give you the information you need to see that you
could resolve things like this manually.

While this may seem like an ingenious idea, I think it is more
of a side effect of how the scheduler works than a design
objective, really. The scheduler finds all showings of each of
the shows it's supposed to record and initially places them all
on the first available card. Next, it looks for things that
conflict and prunes the extra showings. In the process it finds
that there is no question that it can record the one on Sunday
with no conflicts so it records that one. Then mark the others
as OtherShowing so that they aren't in the battle for the other
time slots. This allows her show to win in the only timeslot
where it is available. If all showing of Enterprise had conflicts,
it would have battled for the first showing.

Had you looked at the Fix Conflicts page before this happened,
or before the next time this happens, you would see that the
first showing of Enterprise would be gray and have "0" for 
OtherShowing in the right hand column. If you press "Enter"
it would say "This showing will not be recorded because this
episode will be recorded at another time instead". There will
be a button that says "Record it anyway". If you decide that
you would rather have Enterprise than a girlfriend on Friday
night, you could press this button. This is not the kind of
decision that you would want to have a computer make for you.
Many people would make the wrong choice anyway but at least
it would be their own decision ;-).

--  bjm



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