Can you force Sage to always record live TV?

[p_jacobson]

Many times I've come out of a prerecorded show and entered live TV only to find that I'm interested in what's currently on and I cannot go back to the beginning of the show. I know I can hit record to manually save what I was watching before viewing a prerecorded show, but very frequently, I come out of the prerecorded shows well after the manually recording has ended.

I understand that Sage will stop recording live TV if I watch a prerecorded show. Can this feature be turned off? I'd prefer Sage to always record the live TV program no matter what I'm doing.

[reggie14]

I'm a little confused about what you want. It sounds like you're watching live TV on channel X, then you switch to prerecorded program Y. At the conclusion of program Y you go back to watching channel X, which is in the middle of something you want to see. Is that the situation you're talking about?

If so, I don't really see what good it would do to have Sage keep recording on channel X, as there's no particular reason to think you'd like whatever is on the channel any more than any other channel. It probably would make more sense to enable intelligent recording, and let Sage try to guess what you'd be interested in.

Or maybe I'm off on what it is you're looking for.

[p_jacobson]

You got it right, that's exactly what I'm shooting for. I'm a recent Tivo convert and this is the only thing preventing me from having complete girlfriend acceptance.

I've tried intelligent recording on both Sage and Tivo and neither one of them recorded much of anything we were interested in. But many times we've went over to live TV and wanted to go back a few minutes but can't.

[GKusnick]

Live TV will continue recording as long as there's a client watching. The server's UI counts as a client for this purpose. So for instance if you normally do most of your watching on an extender, you could leave the server's UI continuously running on channel X, so that there'd always be recorded content to back up into whenever your extender client tunes into channel X.

But of course if you tune into channel Y instead, that won't work. (Nor will it on Tivo. Once you start channel-surfing, you lose your backup buffer.) Plus it ties up a tuner full time, so you'd need an additional tuner to watch or record anything else.

That's probably about as close as you're going to get to what you want with Sage as it comes out of the box. Personally the first customization I made was to have it always drop me back into the Recordings list and never into live TV, so I basically never have the experience of coming into a live TV show in the middle and then wanting to back up. I'm always starting from the beginning of a show I've previously scheduled for recording.

[Opus4]

For each tuner you want to always record, you could try setting this property to true:

mmc/encoders/<tuner number>/never_stop_encoding=true

I haven't tried that property & don't know what other side effects there might be, but if it works then I believe it just keeps recording whatever channel the tuner was on & should switch to scheduled recordings as needed.

Many people (obviously not everyone) no longer watch live TV after using SageTV for a while, finding it more convenient to watch only the shows they want to see.

- Andy

[p_jacobson]

Setting that property to true did exactly what I wanted. Thank you for the tip Andy.

I'm with you on the live TV thing. Other than sporting events, I only watch prerecorded shows. The girlfriend however spends a pretty healthy chunk of time watching both live TV and prerecorded shows. If I didn't find a solution, she may have vetoed the HTPC I just built.

Thanks again for everyone's help.