[mythtv-users] Baseball Season

[Bruce Markey]

beckham44 beckham44 wrote:
> I'm setting up Myth to record all the games of my favorite sports team, 
> but not having much luck.  Here are my problems:
> 
> 1) The games will be carried on 5 different channels this year.
> 2) The title of the games is always "MLB Baseball" no matter who is 
> playing.
> 
> For these reasons I can't do an "Always record this recording on any 
> channel" since it will pick up other games as well, because the title of 
> every team's games is "MLB Baseball".  I also can't do 5 seperate 
> "Always record this recording on this channel" recordings because 3 of 
> the 5 channels will be broadcasting other team's games at some point 
> during the season.
> 
> Since the subtitle always shows the teams playing, I thought I would do 
> something like this:
> 
> mysql> UPDATE program SET title="MLB Baseball (TEX)" WHERE title="MLB 
> Baseball" and subtitle LIKE "%Texas%";
> 
> This way I could create a recording to always record "MLB Baseball 
> (TEX)" on any channel, or so I thought.  However, when I did this, all 
> of the start times on the programs that were changed were set to the 
> current date and time - so the game that is 9 days away now started 
> immediately and lasted 209 hours.  Why was this?

The others who posted are correct, this is because the starttime
and endtime are TIMESTAMP fields. However, they both are timestamp
so you need to (re)set endtime=endtime also =).

While you could certainly do this to set a Channel or All
record rule, I've always found in practice that I want Single
records for teams games. Some of the reasons are that I want
to set time for extra innings (overtime, sudden death, playoff
holes, time on, shootout, even rain delay ;-). How much time
depends on what follows because I don't want to create a
conflict an hour and a half later just because there might be
a 14th inning. Singles also allow individual priority settings
and with multiple tuners and long sporting events it is common
to tweak the priority to get the best fit.

With 5 channels of Rangers games, you may find two broadcasts
of the same game (one of them may even be in Spanish). Also ESPN
and FoxSports like to show edited replays late at night and
the next morning. You might think that you could avoid these
dual broadcasts and replays with duplicate matching. However,
if you use Subtitle matching, you would record the first game
of the series but the others would look like repeats (in fact,
it would never record that matchup of teams again ;-).

So, what I do is store a search keyword for each team I follow
and check every few days to set each individual game that I
want.

Go to TV->Schedule Recordings->Search Listings->Descriptions,
click "<New Phrase>" and enter "Texas Rangers" (you only need to
do this once then the system will have it in the list). You will
then see a list of anything with "Texas Rangers" in the title,
subtitle, or description. "R" will set a game to record but most
likely you would want to press "i" to go to the advanced options
page to set the profile, priority, End Late and maybe even Start
Early to include a pre-game show in the same recording. A small
tip =), I usually set my End Late time to 59 or 89 minutes. I don't
expect the game to end in the 60th minute so trimming a minute
allows the the encoder to stop, write out the file and database
info then allow for preroll seconds before the next show. This
also serves as a visual cue that if a game ends as 9:29 then I
know that I set the overtime.

On the Search pages, the "Home" and "End" keys change views so
that it changes to the previous or next keyword results. In other
words, once you've entered your keywords, you can simply tap End
to cycles through Rangers, Rockets, Spurs, Stars and cursor down
and press "i" whenever you see games you want to record.

--  bjm