Programming Guide issues

[Johnniec]

Is there any trick to deal with the situation where the start time for a program is really an estimate? This occurs on Sundays when football is followed by 60 minutes, then The Amazing Race. I want to record the Amazing Race but the start time is variable because of the unpredictable length of football. Of course I could schedule a huge time range, but that's too messy. Ideas? Does Tivo run into the same limitation?

Thanks.

[mayamaniac]

I think a huge padding at the end is the only way. I put 45min padding at the end of all my sports recordings because of game delays or overtime chances. There's a plugin (SRE) to automate this, but it only applies to sports I think.

[Johnniec]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

I think a huge padding at the end is the only way. I put 45min padding at the end of all my sports recordings because of game delays or overtime chances. There's a plugin (SRE) to automate this, but it only applies to sports I think.

I looked at the info regarding the SRE plugin and it looks like a nice attempt to deal with some of these issues. Yet the real problem is in the Programming Guide. If there were an up-to-date Programming Guide (I mean up to the minute), the software could query it as needed to make decisions on when to stop or start the recording of a program. Frankly, with all the dvr's out there today, I would be surprised if there wasn't a Programming Guide out there that could service them better.

[RobJ]

I too would like to see some improvement in this area, dynamic scheduling similar to the SRE plugin for the shows following a variable length sports event. The 3 CBS shows 'The Amazing Race', 'Cold Case', and 'Shark' were all pushed 55 minutes this past Sunday evening, were pushed a bit less than 20 minutes the previous weeks. I've been recording 30 minutes of the following news shows, and using VideoRedo (join,create,cut,adjust timestamp,replace) to replace the shows I wanted with the correct content. 30 minutes was not enough this last Sunday, so I lost Shark.

I found that recording the following program easier to manage (and delete) than adding padding, because padding often has to be stripped later and applies to that program where ever it occurs in the schedule, and I'm only concerned with one problematic time slot.

I seriously doubt (an admittedly ignorant opinion) that Zap2it has up-to-the-minute guide changes, so a SRE-like approach is probably needed.

[Johnniec]

Originally Posted by RobJ

I seriously doubt that Zap2it has up-to-the-minute guide changes, so a SRE-like approach is probably needed.

I would still approach it from as a Programming Guide problem. If there is no available Programming Guide precise enough for these purposes, create your own or create an 'exceptions list'. The 'exceptions list' would contain all the programs predetermined to have start or stop time that is yet-to-be-determined. Then have 'responsible' volunteers (like moderators on message boards) send in the information as soon as they know it. Example: CBS's football coverage stop time is yet-to-be-determined as are the times for the programs following football. When a volunteer (or multiple volunteers for error checking) watching the game determines it is over, they immediately send in the info. The DVR software is smart enough to handle these yet-to-be-determined programs and ends or begins recording as soon as solid times are available. I'm sure a system roughly like this could be implemented.

[Slugger]

CBS seems to be offering an email alert service that will inform subscribers of changes to the Sunday schedule. Seems like I could do something to monitor these programs and pad the recordings as needed.

The problem, off the top of my head, seems to be the alerts are specific to your local affiliate. When you signup you have to pick which affiliate you wish to receive alerts for. So there are two problems I'd have to deal with to incorporate this into SRE.

First, as designed, SRE monitors in progress recordings then extends them (or shortens them). This type of monitoring requires identifying a recording before it starts and then applying pre and post padding. This issue, though some work, I think I can handle.

The second issue is the bigger problem requiring a little more thought. I'd need users to subscribe to the service and forward the email alert they receive to my server (or some server) that can process it and setup some type of monitoring data that SRE can consume and use. I have some ideas on how this, too, could be done, but requires users to forward their email alerts to me and a server with constant uptime.

I guess the other minor issue is getting my hands on a sample of the email alerts as they're sent by CBS. I'd like to think they're generated programatically and can therefore be easily and reliably parsed, but that would also need to be confirmed.

If there's enough interest for this functionality then I wouldn't mind giving it a shot.

[RobJ]

Slugger, I have to start with appreciation for a singularly helpful plugin, many thanks; also for your interest in further helping us.

I'm sure you know more about this than I do, but I thought I'd comment anyway, and you can feel free to correct my impressions. Sports events seem a little different from the subsequent shows. A sports event has a fixed start time, and a variable length. The subsequent shows have a fixed length, but a variable start time. That may be just a technicality to your system, I don't know, but it seems possibly significant to me. Whereas the sports event can be handled by adjusting the ending padding, the later shows seem to me to be more an adjustment to the guide data, not the padding.

In this Sunday night CBS case, a group of shows appear to be all shifted the same amount, and that may actually be the precise amount that the sports event ran past its scheduled end time. That needs to be confirmed, but if true and accurate enough, that might make this an easier problem for you. You may of course prefer a more generalized solution, that would handle other more complex cases.

Per your suggestion, I did signup for the CBS alerts, but haven't received anything yet. I'll be happy to forward anything on to you, if desired.

What I would like out of this: 2 1-hour recordings, 'Cold Case' at ~9pm and 'Shark' at ~10pm.

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by RobJ

Slugger, I have to start with appreciation for a singularly helpful plugin, many thanks; also for your interest in further helping us.

I'm sure you know more about this than I do, but I thought I'd comment anyway, and you can feel free to correct my impressions. Sports events seem a little different from the subsequent shows. A sports event has a fixed start time, and a variable length. The subsequent shows have a fixed length, but a variable start time. That may be just a technicality to your system, I don't know, but it seems possibly significant to me. Whereas the sports event can be handled by adjusting the ending padding, the later shows seem to me to be more an adjustment to the guide data, not the padding.

In this Sunday night CBS case, a group of shows appear to be all shifted the same amount, and that may actually be the precise amount that the sports event ran past its scheduled end time. That needs to be confirmed, but if true and accurate enough, that might make this an easier problem for you. You may of course prefer a more generalized solution, that would handle other more complex cases.

Per your suggestion, I did signup for the CBS alerts, but haven't received anything yet. I'll be happy to forward anything on to you, if desired.

What I would like out of this: 2 1-hour recordings, 'Cold Case' at ~9pm and 'Shark' at ~10pm.

If things work like I'd expect, then this should be possible. I'm making some assumptions, but I'll spell them out here for discussion. This is off the top of my head with little thought on the details for the moment. Here's an overview of how this might work:

* User signs up for email alert for their local CBS affiliate
* Assumption 1: CBS promptly sends this weekly alert sometime before 7pm on Sunday evening (hopefully by 6:45) and this email can easily be parsed to pull out the updated programming information for the evening+
* User will need to auto forward a copy of this email to a server which can parse the email and update a database of programming updates
* Assumption 2: These emails from CBS are specific with the start time of each program. For example, the email will say '60 Minutes will start at 7:25pm'.
* Starting at say 6:55 or whatever SRE will start asking the database for the start time of 60 Minutes. The server will respond with 7:25pm and SRE will then add a start delay of 25 minutes and an end padding of 25 minutes for the recording. The result will be that you should get a 1 hour recording of 60 Minutes from 7:25 - 8:25.

+ There are a lot of things to be figured out. For example, do we get constant alerts from CBS until the night's schedule is finalized? Ideally, the way this works is that at 6:45 or so CBS knows the football game is running late and sends out the first alert, "Prime time delayed until 7:15pm." At this point SRE can delay and pad the recordings by 15 minutes. A key assumption is that these alerts are accurate and continue until the night's schedule is finalized. So before 7:15, if the football game is still going on we need another alert saying something like "primetime delayed until 7:30" and before 7:30 we need to be informed again and so on until the schedule is finalized with a final email saying "Primetime will start at 7:38pm" or whatever. If we're just getting a single alert with an approximation then there really is no point in pursuing this at all because you'll end up with just as many partial recordings as doing nothing.

And then, as is the case now with the current sports monitoring, there is the issue of conflicts introduced by these delays in the schedule. As was the case last week, a 55 minute delay could cause conflicts else where in the schedule. So maybe you get 60 Minutes properly recorded, but miss The Simpsons due to conflict since anything SRE changes turns the recording into a manual recording, which always have priority over favourite rules. If you have more than one tuner then this is less likely to be an issue, but for those with only one then this is a very likely scenario.

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by RobJ

What I would like out of this: 2 1-hour recordings, 'Cold Case' at ~9pm and 'Shark' at ~10pm.

For something this simple, if Shark ends at 11pm, you just need to pad about an hour so that it ends at midnight. This will ensure that you won't be missing anything. The only semi-annoyances are you need to pass forward the game at the beginning of Cold Case, depends on how much of the game is overlapped into it, and most likely you'll have to switch to Shark to see the end of Cold Case. Personally, I can deal with that.

What Slugger is suggesting is very interesting though. Maybe he should get together with nielm and make SRE somehow work with the webserver plugin.

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

What Slugger is suggesting is very interesting though. Maybe he should get together with nielm and make SRE somehow work with the webserver plugin.

SRE already includes a servlet that is compatible with the web server plugin. I've sent nielm a private message asking about including SRE with the web server itself, but haven't heard back from him to this point.

Again, it comes down to just how accurate these email alerts are from CBS. If they are accurate then there is no reason something can't be done in SRE to get the proper one hour recording instead of having to record two hours hoping to get the single hour of content you were hoping for.

[Johnniec]

Very interesting Slugger. I hope your assumptions turn out to be true.