[mythtv-users] Recording baseball with MythTV

[Bruce Markey]

Preseason baseball starts tomorrow so I thought I'd pass along
a few hints for recording with myth's current features while
they are fresh in mind. This assumes North America with Data
Direct but much of it would be applicable for other sports and
other parts of the world.

Sports normally have league and/or sport name in the title and
the names of the teams that are playing in the subtitle.

    title: MLB Preseason Baseball
 subtitle: New York Mets at Washington Nationals
programid: SP1647930000

This is a preseason game but when the season starts the titles
will be "MLB Baseball". Each game has a different programid
and if a game is replayed, it normally has the same programid
but often is edited for time.

So, if you want to follow one team, the most efficient thing to
do is to set a rule from Schedule Recordings->Search Words->
Advanced. Choose "<New Search>", Enter "MLB%Baseball" as the
title phrase and "Giants", for example, as the subtitle phrase.
The "%" wildcard is there to match both preseason and regular
season games. You could even use just "MLB" but this might match
things other than current games especially if you get channels
like ESPN Classics.

Press "OK" to see if this finds any matches. In this case, there
is a Giants game on ESPN for March 8th. If you hit Enter and set
an All record rule on this game, you would actually be setting a
rule for all "MLB Preseason Baseball". This probably isn't what
you want to do. In order to set a Search rule instead, you need
to press "M"enu to bring up the popup again, "M" or Tab to shift
the focus to the buttons then click "Record". The options page
will have "(Power Search)" at the end of the title to let you
know that this is a search rule and not a regular rule for the
show title.

For options, choose "Record at any time on any channel" of course.
Under Scheduling Options, I like to set "End recording 59 minutes
late" to cover some extra innings. The reason I choose 59 or 89
minutes is that either the game will end way before an extra hour
or may go a couple hours longer, it isn't going to end in the 60th
minute. By cutting it a minute short of the next hour, the file
and db entries can be saved and out of the way for preroll seconds
before the start of any show on the next hour. The :29 or :59
on the end time stands as a reminder that I added extra time and
that I may want to change it depending on the shows that follow.

I normally leave the default duplicate rules but you may want to
"Record new episodes only" epically if this helps with unwanted
matches such as ESPN Classics.

For Storage Options, I use a profile that I've set up with a lower
resolution but much higher bitrate. This is a good bang for the
buck tradeoff for sports with a lot of motion. The high bitrate
reduces compression artifacts and the lower res keeps the file
size reasonable. However, I may still want to set an override
to choose a higher res profile for a specific game.

This works great for one team but I used to find that I would
set a bunch of rules for several NBA teams or College Basketball
teams all with the same set of options. "Custom Record" now lets
you set one rule that will match several team names within the
same rule. To use this, go to Schedule Recordings->Custom Record.
Enter a rule name like "Baseball" or the names of your teams or
whatever. Press the down arrow then left arrow twice until it says
"Multiple sports teams" then click the Add button. This shows an
example for recording any of three NBA teams. You can then edit
the title and list of teams to become something like this:

AND program.title LIKE "MLB%Baseball"
AND program.subtitle REGEXP "(Giants|Marlins)"

You can add any number of names all separated by vertical bars. I
could have used San Francisco and Florida instead as they would
match the right teams also but Chicago may not be a good choice
unless you really do want both Cubs and White Sox games.

Again, the "%" will match both preseason and regular season games.
If you just want regular season games you could change it to:

AND program.title = "MLB Baseball"
AND program.subtitle REGEXP "(Yankees|Red Sox)"

In this example it would record any regular season games for either
the Yankees or Red Sox but I really don't care about either team
unless they are playing each other. Here's a rule to record games
when they meet:

AND program.title LIKE "MLB%"
AND program.subtitle LIKE "%Yankees%"
AND program.subtitle LIKE "%Red Sox%"

I can't use a simple wildcard string because the order is reversed
depending on which team is home. This rule will be true when both
team names are included somewhere in the subtitle.

These rules will let the scheduler find and make scheduling decisions
about matching games. However, I often find that I want to make
exceptions and that's okay. If the scheduler decided it would be
better to record a replay to make room for other shows, I may look
at it and decide that I'd rather click "Record anyway" for the live
game and possibly miss another show.

I may see that things would fit if it started late and may be okay
with missing the first inning. I may record a replay but then I know
that I don't need the extra time. I might see that I could record
even later without a conflict in case the game runs long or I may
want to use a different recording profile for a game. All of these
can be handled with overrides which allow you to set options for
a single showing without affecting the normal options for the
main rule. Press enter for the showing on the Scheduled Recordings
page, click the "Add Override" button and choose "Record this
showing with override options". From here you can set any options
that you'd like which will only apply to this one specific game.

Okay, so maybe this was more about taking advantage of mythtv 
features than about watching baseball but I hope at least some
of you found something new that may be useful for you =).

--  bjm