[mythtv-users] Sports events, LiveTV or Watch Recording?

[Greg Woods]

On Fri, 2006-01-27 at 11:17 -0700, Chad wrote:

> I've got it currently setup to Record, and have it End Late by 60
> minutes. 

Sports is most of what I watch on TV, and this is what I do. Because
there are tons of ads during sporting events, I find it very useful to
start watching the game late, and fast forward through all the ads and
other breaks. Some sports, such as baseball and football, lend
themselves to using the time stretch as well. With a time stretch of
about 1.2 and fast forwarding through all the ads and halftime, I can
watch a football game that takes about 3 1/2 hours live in less than 2
hours, without missing anything. Just don't try using time stretch to
watch hockey; it's too fast already (but it's still useful to fast
forward through ads and period breaks). 

Of course, the Super Bowl is a little different, because the pagentry of
half time is part of what you watch for. This year, the Stones will be
playing at half time (yes, I can already hear all the jokes about Mick
Jagger needing a walker :-) Also, the ad agencies all tend to launch
their new campaigns during the Super Bowl, so many of the ads are at
least ones that I haven't seen before (I really don't mind commercials
that much, I just get sick of them after I've seen the same ad for the
100th time, and some of them are *really* stupid).

The trouble with LiveTV is that you have to be there at the console when
the event starts to use that method. Much easier to just set it to
record ahead of time. Myth makes that very easy to do; I can get
practically all of the Avalanche hockey games by just telling it to
record "NHL Hockey" on the "Altitude" channel any time it comes on. It's
even smart enough to automatically ignore all the re-showings of games
and just record the first one. Setting it to record "NFL Football" any
time on any channel automatically caught all the football games for me,
but I did have to manually resolve conflicts caused by my "record 30
minutes late" rule overlapping when there were consecutive games on the
same channel. I'd love to be able to say, record 30 minutes late
*unless* it conflicts with another recording on the same channel, but I
haven't found any way to do that yet. Still, this is way better than my
Comcast DVR (which is used only because my Myth system isn't HD-capable
yet) which has only a very limited "series recording" feature. I pretty
much have to set up every game individually there, but since I have
Myth, I only bother to do that for games that are broadcast in HD.

--Greg