funny favorite behavior

[dvsing]

I'm using Sage 1.4.10. I've got several favorites marked which conflict, and it used to be that always right after adding a new favorite that had conflicting times, it would prompt me within a few seconds and ask what priority I wanted to give. However, just a few days ago I added "show B" to my favorites list. I knew that it would probably conflict with some stuff but it never promtped me. Now today I'm looking at the schedule and "show A", a favorite I already had set a while earlier, is scheduled to be recorded even though "show B" is running at the same time, and Sage never asked me which one to record. Special circumstances for this case are that 'show A' is 60 minutes long, and starts 30 minutes before 'show B' starts. Also, 'show B' is run more times during the week, and I see that Sage has scheduled it to be recorded at a later date. What I want to know is, is this normal behavior to not prompt the user if there is a conflict trying to record the FIRST AVAILABLE showing of a favorite, or does Sage look at the schedule and try to resolve conflicts on it's own, recording a favorite even several days after the first available showing if it resolves the conflict? (this is the behavior I think I am seeing)

Thanks,
Dan

[mlbdude]

That is what I see from my experience. Sage try’s to record your favorites as soon as possible, but getting all the shows recorded is a higher priority. I think if Sage could not find the show at a later date in its listings you would have gotten a conflict.

I have two tuners and that just makes it more interesting .

Here is an old thread that I asked a similar question...

http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthr...light=favorite

[malore]

I remember adding a bunch of favorites and being surprised at how few conflicts I had to resolve. Then a day or so later I had to resolve a bunch. So my guess is that the conflict checker only looks a set number of days ahead and not through the whole guide data.

[mlbdude]

Jeff has stated that the profiler works ahead about three days. But it will look farther to handle conflicts if necessary from what I have seen.

[dvsing]

As a programmer myself, what I would like to see is some sort of log that details how Sage is making it's decisions for recording favorites.

As for these conflicts being reported only a few days before they occur, I'm not seeing this in the case I've mentioned at the top of this thread. I never was notified of a conflict, and the first run of my newly added favorite was NOT recorded (because presumably it was taping another favorite at the time). I am assuming sage didn't see this as a conflict since it saw that it could tape one of the favorite episodes at a later date.

I'd like to have some sort of control over this behavior. Perhaps a per-favorite option to "resolve conflicts by recording later airings, look ahead X days" or an option to force it to record the first availble airing, and report a conflict if there is one.

Also, I dont have 2 TV cards right now, but I'm pushing towards that kind of setup, and from what I've heard, if I have two favorites airing at the same time, it may not use both cards to record them both... this doesn't make sense.

It seems that there needs to be more user control in the scheduling algorithm, at least from my point of view. Perhaps there needs to be two types of favorites: "MUST RECORD" favorites, that I would use for my new show runs, or reruns that I absolutely expect to be recorded the first time, and then "RECORD IF YOU CAN" favorites that it will grab if nothing else more important is going on. I suppose this could be done just by being able to prioritize the favorite list.

As a programmer, again, it would be cool to actually script out the algorithm ie: record show X unless show Y is on at the same time if it's a Friday, but on Sunday record show Y instead of show X, etc... It could get pretty complex, but that type of control would be nice. I dont know how much of this controllability will come packaged in with SageTV 2.0 and the studio-- I've heard it's pretty customizeable.

-Dan

[mlbdude]

Also, I dont have 2 TV cards right now, but I'm pushing towards that kind of setup, and from what I've heard, if I have two favorites airing at the same time, it may not use both cards to record them both... this doesn't make sense.

With two tuners it does record as soon as it can. There is a property setting you can set to true or false to modify this behavior.

[dvsing]

What IS this property setting? Does this apply to having only one encoder card too? (ie: will it prompt you for conflicts if it can't record all first-airings of favorites?)

-Dan

[mlbdude]

scheduler/disable_phase1_optimization

Setting it to true will fill up all tuners and try and record every favoritate ASAP. Setting it to false will (with multi-tuner) try and record everything while leaving the tuners free as much as possible.

By default it is True.

[dkardatzke]

There will be more priority settings and limiting favorites to specific channels in version 2.0.

[Narflex]

FYI - scheduler/disable_phase1_optimization has no effect at all in V1.4.10