[mythtv-users] is mythtv smart enough to do this (overlap/back-to-back) with recordings?

[Brad Templeton]

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 08:34:47PM +1000, Peter Schachte wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 01:31:27AM -0700, Brad Templeton wrote:
> > I think in general that when most people add padding, they don't
> > mean "and don't record another show I asked for if it would interfere
> > with the padding."    They might mean that sometimes, but I suspect
> > they mean, "pad if you can" most of the time and only rarely
> > "pad, and damn the torpedoes."
> 
> In Australia most prime time shows on the commercial networks start
> and late, often by 5 or more minutes.  To make matters somewhat worse,
> some networks tend to make their shows start 5 or 10 minutes past the
> half hour.  And shows often start immediately after the end of the
> previous show, with no intervening commercials.  Put together, if you
> don't record 5 to 10 minutes past the scheduled end of a show, you
> stand a better than even chance of missing the end.  Not good for WAF.
> 
> A cavalier approach to padding at the end of recordings would not work
> well here.

Ah, but what I was supposting -- and you may not agree -- was that
given the choice between:

    a) Don't record the padded program at all
        (even if the two shows are on the same channel)
    b) Don't record the program that overlaps the padding at all
        (even if the two shows are on the same channel)
    c) Give up the padding if it overlaps another show
        (especially if the two shows are on the same channel)
    d) Give up the first or last few minutes of another show if
       it's overlapped by padding

I really don't think more than a few users would pick (a) or (b) which
are the two things Myth does based on recording priority.  But I
could be misinterpreting, perhaps that's what they want.  Of course,
when both shows are on the same channel, users clearly will find a
and b to be wrong behaviours, and there are a number of different
solutions proposed here for that, ranging from my simple one of
turning them into something like a playback group to allow rew/ff
between them, to starting writing out the file for show #2 before show#1
finishes, etc.


The choice between c and d also can depend on recording priority.

About the only time I could see people not want C or D would be if
they were super tight on disk space.  Considering the cost of disk
space, this is the group I would send to the scheduler to detect the
conflicts and fix 'em.

If padding gets longer than a few minutes, c and d become less useful
of course, though still much better than a/b.  You would also have
to tag the partial recording as partial, so it doesn't preclude
later recordings of the missed minutes.