[mythtv] Small show overlap schedule conflict resolution strategy

Bruce Markey bjm at lvcm.com
Thu Nov 6 14:29:17 EST 2003


[Top posting to piss-off the elitist brow-beaters ;-]

What is needed is a more general mechanism to allow starttime
and endtime offsets. This would be useful for many situations
especially recording overtime for sporting events. Commercial
DVRs only allow starting early and ending late. MythTV should
allow positive and negative values at either end.

So NBC lists Saturday Night Live at 11:30-1:01. If I want to
record something at 1:00am Sun, I should be able to go to the
Advanced Options page and set the endtime offset to -1 minutes
for SNL. I know that by 1:00 they've said goodbye and are running
commercials so I know I want to trim SNL and catch the next
show from the beginning. In your ER example, I don't know, and
myth can't know, if you would rather see the first minute of
ER or the last minute of the previous show. You should have the
choice of starting ER one minute late or ending the other show
one minute early rather than leaving it to the computer to
decide for you.

Another situation that comes up ofter is a basketball game from
7:30-10:00 but there is another show from 7:00-8:00. The normal
workaround is to create a manual record starting at 8:00. However,
I'd prefer to just go to the Advanced Options page and set the
game to start 30 minutes late and end 60 minutes late.

I've mentioned before that I think there are four or five people
who I believe would do a bang-up job of this if they get inspired.
Still without naming names ;-) all of those people have chimed
in on design issues in recent days. I hope one of them takes the
need for this feature to heart.

--  bjm

Rob Comstock wrote:
> This is continuation of a thread from the mythtv users list.
> 
> In the case where the schedule of two conflicting shows overlap a small amount (less than 5 minutes or therabouts)
> it should be possible to add a recording option to allow overlap between shows of "n" minutes. I have seen where ER starts at 8:59
> and runs till 10 and another show I want to record runs from 8 to 9. Current system makes me choose between the two. If the overlap
> mins fall below the threshold then both shows can be captured with the following show having its minutes trimmed from its beginning.
> 
> If the overlap exceeds the limit Myth recording behaves as it does currently to prevent conflicts. Default allowable overlap shall
> be 0 minutes.
> 
> Comments on this?
> 
> The following response came from Joseph A. Caputo:
> An alternative approach would be rather than put the burden on the user to figure out how many minutes of overlap to specify, why
> not add an option to the Conflict Resolution screen.  Allow me to explain:  let's say I want to record 'Friends' from 20:00 - 20:32
> (damn NBC!) and 'Crank Yankers' on Comedy Central from 20:30 - 21:00.  Since
> they overlap be 2 minutes, I'd normally have to choose one or the other.  But, if we add an option for 'partial recording', we could
> do the following:
> 
> --------- Conflict Resolution Screen --------------
> The following scheduled recordings conflict with each other.  Which
> would you like to record?
> 
> (checkbox) Remember this choice and use it automatically in the future
> (checkbox) Record non-overlapping portions of conflicting program(s)
> 
> (item) Friends - Thur 20:00 on Channel 10
> (item) Crank Yankers - Thur 20:30 on Channel 26
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> 
> If you check the box marked "Record non-overlapping" and choose  'Friends', it will record all of Friends (20:00 - 20:32) and the
> portion of 'Crank Yankers' from 20:32 - 21:00 (missing the first 2 minutes).  OTOH, if we check the box and choose 'Crank Yankers',
> it will record Friends from 20:00 - 20:30 (missing the last 2 minutes) and
> all of 'Crank Yankers' from 20:30 - 21:00.
> 
> Now comes the fun part -- discussing how best to implement this!
> 
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