[mythtv-users] Tour de France

[Bruce Markey]

The Tour de France starts tomorrow morning and, barring a late
entry, will have a winner other than Lance Armstrong for the
first time since 1998 (or was that 1889?). Last year I wrote
about how to record the Outdoor Life Network coverage in North
America but some things have changed this year.

Bruce Markey wrote:
> A couple years ago I decided to record a bit of the Tour day
> Lance to see what all the fuss was about. I'm now hooked on
> this very tactical sport. Beginning this weekend, Lance Armstrong
> will be going after his unprecedented seventh straight win in
> the last race of his career. Once again the Outdoor Life Network
> will have something like live coverage of the entire race. All
> you have to do is wake up by 5:30am PDT and stare at the TV for
> six hours every day for a month... or use a DVR to fast forward
> through it at your own pace.
> 
> OLN has a long version early in the morning where they start off
> delayed and have compressed highlights of the early hours then
> catch up with live events or something like that. They then edit
> it down to a shorter version and repeat the short version four or
> five times per day. OLN essentially becomes the Tour de France
> channel during July.
> 
> For each stage/day the same subtitle and description is used for
> the live and edited version but the live versions have different
> programids than the replays. This means that if you set a Channel
> or All record rule, you would get the long plus one short version
> each day. This suggests two strategies; get all of the live or
> flexibly grab any one of the replays.

This doesn't appear to be true this year. While the length of the
showings vary throughout the day (long live in the morning, short
replays during the day and "expanded coverage" in the evening) they
have the same programid for all showings of the same stage. Therefore,
you could use a Channel or All rule. However, that may "L"ater the
live coverage for a replay.

> To get the live versions only, go to the Custom Record page and
> create a rule like this:
> 
> program.title = "Bicycle Racing"
> AND HOUR(program.starttime) < 8

This year the title is "Cycling" and the subtitles for this event
all match "Tour de France: %".

program.title = 'Cycling'
AND HOUR(program.starttime) < 8

> For EDT, change the 8 to 11 (other timezones should know what to do =).
> You can cut'n'paste this or create it with "Match an exact title"
> and "Not in primetime" then edit. Either way, click the "Record"
> button to set options.
> 
> As I recall the live versions can sometimes run over so it's
> probably a good idea to add an extra half hour or so. You may also
> want to use a lower resolution recording profile because the image
> quality from an antenna on a moving motorcycle with a hand held
> camera from half way around the world isn't exactly IMAX.
> 
> The other approach would be to change the "<" to ">" which will
> then choose from any of the edited rebroadcasts. In that case,
> you shouldn't need extra time on the end and should probably set
> the priority very low so the scheduler can choose a showing that
> doesn't conflict with anything else.

The custom rule above will work for version 0.18 or later. However,
if you are using current SVN, there is a new trick that doesn't relay
on times and timezones:

program.title = 'Cycling'
AND program.first > 0

This will match just the first live broadcast each morning (BTW see
http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-12.html#ss12.5 if you don't
know what these code snippets are for).

--  bjm