Force recording in original timeslot

[spacecadet]

My setup has 1 HD tuner and 2 SD tuners for recording cable TV.

Red Sox baseball games originally air in both HD and SD, and are then replayed periodically throughout the next 24 hours (again, in both HD and SD).

If there is a conflict on the HD tuner during the game's original timeslot, then I would hope that Sage would fallback and record the game in SD instead. However, Sage decides to record the game at a later timeslot on the HD tuner (picking up a replay of the game).

Assuming at least one tuner is free, I'd like to force Sage to record the game in its original timeslot (and not pick up the replays unless all tuners are busy). As far as the game is concerned, viewing it in the original timeslot is more important to me than getting HD instead of SD.

Short of updating my favorite to record only certain timeslots (which I'd like to avoid), is there a way to make sure that Sage falls back to the SD tuner when the HD tuner is busy at game time (instead of waiting for the HD replay)?

[spacecadet]

I found this in the 6.5 beta release notes:

SageTV will now try to record HD airings of a show over SD airings even if that means the recording will occur at a later time. This can be disabled by setting the property prefer_hdtv_recordings_over_sdtv=false

Is the prefer_hdtv_recordings_over_sdtv property used for anything other than conflict resolution? That is, if I set this property to false to clear up my Red Sox problem, can I expect any other side effects (beyond the obvious issue of getting the SD version of other conflicted shows as well).

[spacecadet]

Originally Posted by spacecadet

I found this in the 6.5 beta release notes:

SageTV will now try to record HD airings of a show over SD airings even if that means the recording will occur at a later time. This can be disabled by setting the property prefer_hdtv_recordings_over_sdtv=false

Is the prefer_hdtv_recordings_over_sdtv property used for anything other than conflict resolution? That is, if I set this property to false to clear up my Red Sox problem, can I expect any other side effects (beyond the obvious issue of getting the SD version of other conflicted shows as well).

Hmmm.... Looks like this has the unwanted side effect of causing all sorts of recordings to choose the SD version instead of the HD version (even when there are no conflicts and the HD flag is set on the HD version of the show).

Any other thoughts on how to solve this one?

[Slugger]

Two thoughts:

1. I sent in a feature request awhile back asking SageTV to include the "live" flag in their listings and make that flag available within the Sage API. Zap2It's listings data includes a "live" flag to denote that an airing is the live event (as opposed to a replay of the event). With this flag and enhancements to the favs API, one would hopefully be able to restrict recordings to "live" airings only. Even if the "live" flag were made available and no changes to the favs API then one could write a plugin to restrict recordings to the live airings.

2. In the absence of the "live" flag being added to the EPG, you could still write a plugin that would always record the earliest airing of a favourite by marking the later airings as "don't like". If you use IR recordings then it'll probably screw those up, but it's certainly feasible. I've written similar plugins to ensure hockey games aren't recorded on channels known to be blacked out for me by marking those airings as don't like, leaving the core to only choose airings from channels that I do get - works quite nicely.