Remove Favorite deletes all the shows

[malore]

I'm sure this is probably a well know problem, it just wasn't to me.

I had a large number of shows recorded for a PBS show and I didn't want any to record during PBS's fund raising, so I removed the favorite. SageTV then deleted all my recordings of the show. Prior to this, I had 15GB of free space, and nothing planned to record until tomorrow night, so there was absolutely no need to free up disk space.

[Opus4]

Yeah, it has been known -- for one thread, see this one. You had Intelligent Recording OFF, right? There was a change in v13 to have it remove 'extra' shows when IR is off... and once you removed the favorite, those shows became 'extra'. I'll bet this is one area that gets some attention for the next release.

- Andy

[mlbdude]

Yeah that is new intended behavior. Hopefully enough of us asked for it to go back to the old way it will change in the next release .

[nielm]

There seems to be 2 classes of Sage users...

The ones that want Sage to delete non-faviourite shows (fragments, watched LiveTV) as soon as possible, who don't use IR, and don't understand why Sage records everything filling up their HDD...

And The ones that don't care about fragments left on-disk, who leave Sage to delete things as/when necessary (and often use IR).

This new feature of 'delete things as soon as possible' if IR is disabled is a reasonable solution for the first class of users, except for the unintended side-effect that removing a favourite results in removing of all recorded content for that favourite without any warning!

It would be much more user-friendly if Sage gave an 'Are you sure because all recorded content for this favourite will be removed' message when removing favourites when IR is disabled. After all it is much more 'dangerous' action than deleting a single show (which pops up a confirmation)

Even if IR is enabled a message such as 'Are your sure -- recorded content for this favourite may be deleted when there is no free space' would make the consequences of removing a favourite more obvious...

The same also goes for removing the flag from manually recorded content.

Note: I am mostly in the second category, but it would be nice to see how much available space is in my Sage video folder before it needs to start deleting favourites (ie free space + non-favourite shows)... Perhaps a disk space breakdown in the System Info page in order of delete priority and separately for each video folder...
Unwatched Manual Recordings: xx Gb
Watched Manual Recordings: xx Gb
Unwatched Favourites: xx Gb
Watched Favourites: xx Gb
Unwatched LiveTV/IR: xx Gb
Watched LiveTV/IR: xx Gb
LiveTV Fragments: xx Gb
Free Space: xx Gb

Add a 'delete all' button for each category (with confirmation) and I think all classes of users would be happy!

[Opus4]

The new auto-delete is simply a bit too aggresive this first time around. I already mentioned, in the link I gave above, that one easy fix would be to flag any show not a scheduled recording & get rid of it when SageTV goes to sleep. This would function perfectly well even when IR is on, since the only things that aren't 'scheduled' are live tv. If Frey wants to get fancy with it, they could add a configuration option for what auto-immediate-delete should get rid of.

- Andy

[ckron]

My biggest concern would have to be file fragmentation. If SageTV leaves the HDD almost full all of the time, even the best defrag program (ie Diskeeper 8) will not effectively defrag the drive.

I think perhaps after stability issues have been put to rest (ie OSD on PVR-350), the ability to configure how Sage handles deletion of files would be nice.

Any thoughts?

I gotta have my morning coffee

[ToxMox]

Originally posted by nielm
There seems to be 2 classes of Sage users...

The ones that want Sage to delete non-faviourite shows (fragments, watched LiveTV) as soon as possible, who don't use IR, and don't understand why Sage records everything filling up their HDD...

And The ones that don't care about fragments left on-disk, who leave Sage to delete things as/when necessary (and often use IR).
<SNIP>

I'm in a seperate class. I don't use IR but I like to leave Sage to delete stuff when necessary. I manually schedule everything I want to record every day with my 4 tuners. I have no favorites set at all. I like being able to retrieve shows I've watched in case my fiance missed a show.

[mlbdude]

I leave my drives full constantly (320GB). After 8+ months no problems with fragmentation using 64k clusters.

[ckron]

Originally posted by mlbdude
I leave my drives full constantly (320GB). After 8+ months no problems with fragmentation using 64k clusters.

So formatting the drive with 64k clusters is the key? Just for curiosity's sake, does anyone know why that is?

[Cayars]

Originally posted by nielm
<snip>
This new feature of 'delete things as soon as possible' if IR is disabled is a reasonable solution for the first class of users, except for the unintended side-effect that removing a favourite results in removing of all recorded content for that favourite without any warning!

It would be much more user-friendly if Sage gave an 'Are you sure because all recorded content for this favourite will be removed' message when removing favourites when IR is disabled. After all it is much more 'dangerous' action than deleting a single show (which pops up a confirmation)
<snip>

I understand why live shows and fragments will get deleted. But why delete perfect recordings when someone removes a favorite? I think this is a bad design choice as the user can manually delete the shows if needed.

My suggestion would be to NEVER delete a show when favorites are touched. I just don't see the need to do this.

Carlo

[nielm]

But why delete perfect recordings when someone removes a favorite?

When you remove a favourite, the shows that were recorded as that favourite become identical in Sage's DB to shows recorded with IR, and things recorded as Live TV. There is no flag in the DB for 'I used to be a favourite so don't delete me!'

The 'aggressive delete as soon as possible' mode then sees these shows as things it can delete...

It is only 'bad behaviour' because we are used to the old behaviour, and it seems to have been implemented in a bit of a rush to please the 'Why does Sage record everthing!!!' users without thinking through the implications, and adding protection to 'dangerous' actions such as removing a favourite...

After all it is a Beta, and issues like this is what the Beta is meant to flush out.

[ToxMox]

Why not have a priority system where every recording is given a priority of let's say 1, 2, or 3 that you can set when creating favorites or setup as defaults for all recordings similar to the way you can choose recording quality presets. If you give a show a priority of 1 then sage will never automatically delete it. 2 sage will only delete if it needs space or 3 sage will delete as soon as possible. You get the gist.

[ckron]

Originally posted by nielm


It is only 'bad behaviour' because we are used to the old behaviour, and it seems to have been implemented in a bit of a rush to please the 'Why does Sage record everthing!!!' users without thinking through the implications, and adding protection to 'dangerous' actions such as removing a favourite...

After all it is a Beta, and issues like this is what the Beta is meant to flush out.

Good point! Sometimes we have to be willig to learn how a program works instead of expecting the program to learn how we work.

[Cayars]

Originally posted by nielm
When you remove a favourite, the shows that were recorded as that favourite become identical in Sage's DB to shows recorded with IR, and things recorded as Live TV. There is no flag in the DB for 'I used to be a favourite so don't delete me!'

The 'aggressive delete as soon as possible' mode then sees these shows as things it can delete...

It is only 'bad behaviour' because we are used to the old behaviour, and it seems to have been implemented in a bit of a rush to please the 'Why does Sage record everthing!!!' users without thinking through the implications, and adding protection to 'dangerous' actions such as removing a favourite...

After all it is a Beta, and issues like this is what the Beta is meant to flush out.

This is exactly my point. It would appear that when the favorite is removed the file meta-data is "touched" to note that it wasn't a manual recording (or something similar).

What I'm saying is that it probably should not touch the file meta-data. It should be treated like any other manual recording.

And I understand this is a beta, but unless we express our views then the functionality will carry over to the release version and I'd rather this functionality not carry over.

Carlo

[ckron]

Originally posted by ckron
I think perhaps after stability issues have been put to rest (ie OSD on PVR-350), the ability to configure how Sage handles deletion of files would be nice.

Any thoughts?

I gotta have my morning coffee

Maybe user options is the way to go

[malore]

While searching for something else I found a line in sage.properties that seems to stop SageTV from deleting all the recordings of a show if you remove it from your favorites and don't have IR active.

change:
seeker/clear_partials_and_unwanted_when_ir_off=true
to:
seeker/clear_partials_and_unwanted_when_ir_off=false

[mlbdude]

The only stipulation is that it won't instantly auto delete Live TV shows either. It will work just like 1.4.

[dvsing]

I saw the question asked in this thread so I'll throw my $0.02 in... you HAVE to use a video storage drive formatted with 64k cluster. HAVE TO. It's a requirement. That way you do not have to worry about defragmenting ever. Sure, the video files will get fragmented, but with 64k clusters you could have 100% fragmented video files and still be able to record/play several streams simultaneously.

I didn't believe this until I tried it... I had been running sagetv on a standard-formatted drive (4k clusters?) and fragmentation would ALWAYS start to affect recording and playback quality. Since I've switched to 64k clusters, zero problems.

Other performance recommendations:
* give SageTV and/or SageRecorder high priority. This can be done manually through the task manager or you can do what I do and use a utility on boot-up to increase the process priority. This way, if you run a CPU intensive application on the PC that is recording, it wont clobber the video. (I've had this happen before, and since I increased the priority it hasn't been an issue).
* Also, if you're doing network encoding, increase the priority of the "System" process to High. By using taskinfo2003 I could see that this process is the one that opens the files for recording for windows file sharing.

By setting these priorities to high, you will ensure that SageTV gets all the cpu cycles it needs to make a recording. Sage consumes very very little CPU time when encoding in the background, so this won't affect your other applications.. It's just critical that SageTV get the cpu cycles that it needs IMMEDIATELY so the record buffer doesn't overflow.

-Dan

[jblust]

Originally posted by dvsing
I saw the question asked in this thread so I'll throw my $0.02 in... you HAVE to use a video storage drive formatted with 64k cluster. HAVE TO. It's a requirement. That way you do not have to worry about defragmenting ever. Sure, the video files will get fragmented, but with 64k clusters you could have 100% fragmented video files and still be able to record/play several streams simultaneously.

I didn't believe this until I tried it... I had been running sagetv on a standard-formatted drive (4k clusters?) and fragmentation would ALWAYS start to affect recording and playback quality. Since I've switched to 64k clusters, zero problems.

I am interested in hearing a technical explanation of why 64K clusters != fragmentation... What is special about 64K?

[Opus4]

Originally posted by jblust
I am interested in hearing a technical explanation of why 64K clusters != fragmentation... What is special about 64K?

He didn't say the files would not get fragmented; he said that even when fragmented, it wouldn't hurt playback performance as much as fragmented files with a 4K cluster size can. With 64K clusters, the drive doesn't have to seek as often to read more of the file.

- Andy