[mythtv-users] Baseball Season

[Bruce Markey]

John Patrick Poet wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, Bruce Markey wrote:
> 
> 
>>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:
>>>
> 
> 
> <snip>
> 
>>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.
> 
> 
> ReplayTVs have a feature called SPORTSGUARD.  When the replay goes to record
> a sporting event, it will automatically record up to an extra hour on the
> end of the program --- but only if that extra time does not cause a conflict
> with another recording schedule.

I've had and used a ReplayTV and have no reservations in saying
that it sucks in almost every way imaginable. You've conveniently
ignored the issues of priority (or lack thereof) disk space
pre-allocation, dual broadcasts, re-broadcasts, wanting more than
an hour of overtime and the possibility that overtime may be more
important than a trivial show that follows. I've used other DVRs
as well and none of them can do the impossible task of mind
reading and do the right thing for all sporting events. It really
takes human intervention. For example, PGA Golf coverage ends on
time for Thur, Fri and Sat rounds but may have playoff holes on
Sun. This is one of many examples where it isn't practical to
expect a system to automatically do the right thing in all
circumstances.

As with so many features of ReplayTV, this sounds good as a bullet
item and may look good in a demo but in practice the overall system
is somewhat better than a VCR and lame compared to other DVRs.
The test of time shows that most people wise up and move on and
ReplayTV has never been able to hold any significant market share
no matter how glitzy their features sound on paper.

> For Myth to be able to do this, the new "direct" XML listings would have be
> used, to figure out if the program in question is a sporting event.  The
> current XMLTV system does not provide that information.

Not really. When I set a record rule for a sporting event, I know
that it may have overtime or know that it is prerecorded and
will end at the scheduled time. Award shows or other live events
may benefit from such a feature also so a checkbox option on the
adv opt page would make more sense than a hardcoded feature for
things that are marked as sports in the listings. However, I
really wouldn't be interested in such a feature because I do want
to see them on the Conflicts page and consider what I want to do
on a case by case basis anyway. An automatic overtime feature may
happen to do the right thing in some cases but I'm always going to
want to look at the situation and possibly tweak it to know that
it will be what I want.

--  bjm