Favorite Recordings/Keep at most/Marathons... ack!

[z3k3z]

Hey,

Luv your product . Here is my puzzle.

Consider me a show browser, not a show enthusiast. I have many many favorites, of which i limit each to keep just a few (2-4) episodes on disk. I dont care if i miss a few if they roll off as time passes. Imagine a situation where favorite A is higher in priority than B. A is running a marthon... 12 shows in one day! Yikes! A is configured to keep only 4, however all 12 are scheduled to record, therefore blocking the recording of lower priority favorites, like B for that day. For A, only 4 recordings are kept, but essentially i have wasted recording 8. Is there a way to work around this?


Thanks!

[GKusnick]

If you turn off autodelete for that favorite, it will keep the oldest four rather than the newest four, and not bother recording new ones until you manually delete the older ones.

Apart from that, no, the scheduler isn't smart enough to look ahead and schedule only the last four airings in a marathon.

[stanger89]

No, but it should raise a conflict if (in the rest of the guide data) it will be unable to record an alternative airing of B.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

If you turn off autodelete for that favorite, it will keep the oldest four rather than the newest four, and not bother recording new ones until you manually delete the older ones.

Apart from that, no, the scheduler isn't smart enough to look ahead and schedule only the last four airings in a marathon.

Actually there is a long-standing bug related to this (I know because I have many favorites set-up this way).

Say you have a favorite for a show like "South Park" that is on all the time on multiple channels, and you set it to keep at most "2" and automatic delete. In this case, it will record every single episode and only keep the 2 most recent. This is kind of a waste, since it may block other things from recording and it puts extra wear and tear on your computer constantly recording and deleting stuff. This setting is really meant more for things like the nightly news, where it's only on once a day and you would really only want to keep the most recent 1 or 2 episodes anyway.

Say instead, you change it to manual delete. Now it should just record 2 episodes and then stop. It shouldn't record anything else until you delete one. Then it should record another one to keep you always at the 2 that you set. This mostly works, but it gets messed up if there are multiple shows on back to back or close to it.

Here's the problem: The scheduler will schedule every episode of "South Park" that it sees as far out as it schedules recordings (7 days on my machine, though I think the default was 3 days). This could be 100 episodes even though I only asked it to keep at most 2. The scheduler only runs periodically (once a day I think, plus when certain events trigger it). So, if there is a marathon of 12 episodes in one day, it may record all 12 before the scheduler runs again. The next time the scheduler runs it will see that it has more than the 2 episodes I requested, so it will remove the next 88 episodes from the scheduled recordings, but it keeps all 12 episodes that it already recorded.

So it works (sort of), but you can sometimes end-up with more episodes than you asked for and the recording schedule will show a lot of episodes that will never really get recorded (this can also make the disk-space indicator look like you will run out of space quickly).

I find it is best to give these types of shows the lowest possible priority so they don't block other more important shows from getting recorded.

[pez]

I don't have a way to fix this, as if seen what Tiki posted too. But I did add it to my list (#3) of what should be fixed/enhanced in 7.0.

[z3k3z]

Is there a way to indicate that an airing be skipped by the scheduler? Instead of marking as watched, which would remove all chances of recording again, skipped would mean to bypass this airing and then let the scheduler pick it up in the future. This way I can manage which episodes on a marathon I want recorded this time around.

Thanks for your answers!

[GKusnick]

Best way to handle that is probably to disable the favorite temporarily (e.g. by limiting it to a channel you know that show won't be on) and then set manual recordings on the specific episodes you want.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by z3k3z

Is there a way to indicate that an airing be skipped by the scheduler? Instead of marking as watched, which would remove all chances of recording again, skipped would mean to bypass this airing and then let the scheduler pick it up in the future. This way I can manage which episodes on a marathon I want recorded this time around.

Thanks for your answers!

AFAIK, there is no way to do this. You currently have 3 choices that I can think of:
1. Mark it as watched (in which case it will never record again unless you do a Manual Record, or use the Viewing History Menu later to find the episode and mark it as Un-Watched).

2. Just let it record and delete it later.

3. Remove the Favorite so it doesn't record and re-create the Favorite again sometime later.

Unless you are really crunched for space, #2 is probably the best option.

[ppa]

Another way is to set the Don't Like Flag for all the airings of that favorite on the marathon channel. Once it's done, you won't have to go back in to make other changes.