[mythtv-users] Auto-Expire Behavior

[Chris Pinkham]

> I have some questions about the auto expire feature:
> 
> 1. If auto-expire is turned off in the global setup, but enabled for an
> individual program, does anything happen?

It depends, the "Auto-Expire Default" in the settings screen controls the
default value of auto-expire whenever you create a new scheduled recording.

When you do schedule a new program to record, you can override the default
value by changing the auto-expire setting on the recording options screen.

You can also change the auto-expire setting for an individual recording
after it is recorded by using the popup menu on the Watch Recordings screen
and I think on the OSD popup menu while playing a recording.

> 2. If auto-expire is turned on in the global setup, but disabled for an
> individual program, does this mean that the system will never
> automatically delete that program?

Yes, the global setting is only used when you create new recording schedules.
The global setting is copied to the new recording schedule.  When a recording
is made from that scheduled item, the auto-expire value from the schedule
is copied to the individual recording.  The auto-expire setting on the
individual recording determines whether that recording can be auto-expired
or not.  For instance, you could have your global default auto-expire set
to OFF, but auto-expire turned on for your wife's Trading Spaces shows, but
you could have turned OFF auto-expire for that one episode where they glued
feathers to the wall of the person's living room.  You don't want that
individual recording to expire so you can keep reminding your wife why you'll
never let those people touch your house.  So in this case, the only thing
that would get auto-expired would be the Trading Spaces episodes except for
the feathers one.

> 3. If "max episodes" is set to 0 in the recording options and
> auto-expire is enabled, what decides when an episode of a program gets
> deleted?

Max episodes is independent of the auto-expire on/off setting.  Max Episodes
allows you to say "Only keep X episodes of this show EVER".  This works
whether auto-expire is turned on or off.  Myth checks the max episodes before
it checks the auto-expire status, so it will expire episodes over their
max before it will delete stuff set to auto-expire.  The reasoning for this
is that if you only want 3 episodes of a show but a 4th is recording, it
makes sense to delete the oldest of the 4 rather than auto-expiring some
other unrelated program just because you need space to record that 4th
episode of the first show.

> 4. What does "delete oldest over max" do?

This deletes the oldest program when you reach the Max Episodes rather than
stopping recording.  Normally when you reach the Max Episodes, Myth will
stop recording that show.  This is useful if you only want to keep around
X episodes of a series that you watch.  If you use Myth to record the news
or other current-event type shows, then you could turn on "delete oldest over
max" and Myth would not stop recording new episodes, but it would instead
delete the oldest episodes so it always had the X newest episodes instead of
the X oldest.  For instance, I record "The Daily Show" every day, but have
it set to "Max Episodes" == 5, and "Delete Oldest Over Max" == ON.  That
way whenever I get around to watching it, I'm only watching stuff that's a
week old at the most.  Others use this to record the news every day but only
keep 1 episode of it around.  This way they always see today's news if they
watch it using Myth.

-- 

Chris