[mythtv-users] is mythtv smart enough to do this(overlap/back-to-back) with recordings?

[Brad Templeton]

On Sat, Jul 29, 2006 at 06:24:11PM -0700, chris at cpr.homelinux.net wrote:
> A slightly more enlightened solution says "I can't give you the 
> pre/post padding, but if none of these shows can be rescheduled 
> then I'll do a hard swap between the tuners at 1732."  (I chose the 
> late switch on the assumption that it's better to miss the start of 
> a show than the end of a show.)

Actually, that really varies a lot.  In fact, in the long term, I
think the only real answer is to have volunteers maintain a database
of whether the start and/or end of particular shows are important.

This is not that hard, actually.  There are only a modest number of
shows in any given season.   

For example, the last 5 minutes of 60 minutes are always commercials.
For a long time on my Tivo I wanted to record 60 minutes and The Simpsons
(which Fox would start at 7:59, though it listed the starting at 8:00)
and thus the Simpsons needed padding, and conflicted with 60 minutes.

I just always wished the system understood how minutes 55-60 were
useless, and the first minute of Simpson had two little jokes.

Some shows start with an important teaser (more common these days.)
Some have an ending teaser.   Some always start or end with theme music
or credits.

Movies of course you always want the end of.  Sports you often want
beyond the end of but care only minorly about the beginning of.

> A *REALLY* fuzzy solution would split tuner #1 at 1728 and then 
> swap tuners at 1731.  The 3-minute fragment from tuner #1 would 
> then be transcoded to match the output of tuner #2 and the parts 
> that make up show #4 assembled during post-processing.  In this 
> case, Shows #1 and #4 are complete, show #2 loses half the 
> post-pad, and show #3 starts a minute late.

Transocoding sounds like too much.  Some formats (mpeg-ts) are even
capable of format change in mid-file, but not all.

The other question here is, how important is the problem of the
person with multiple tuners and lots of conflicts?   Tuners continue
to get cheaper.   I have one tuner for cable and one for DTV and
I think I watch too much TV and I still don't have conflicts often.
But other people here seem keen to get as many tuners as possible.

I would bet however that only a small fraction of users actually
use recording priorities.  They are not a great interface to begin
with, and if you have multiple tuners you rarely have to worry about
them anyway.   (I use them, but only for my "suggestions" system so
that suggestions are always lower priority than regular shows.)
> 
> That's what *you* are talking about.  Dean (?) is saying that 
> although your simple example has a simple solution, that solution 
> doesn't scale.  The more constraints you put on a situation ("two 
> shows on the same channel on the same tuner") the less practical 
> the solution becomes.

It is however a very common problem, I think, much more common than
the problem of having to switch tuners on the same channel because
the 2nd program is of lower priority.   If that happens to 1 myth
user in 100 I would be surprised.    Recording adjacent programs
on the other hand is something many users encounter.