Intelligent Recordings - Need clarification

[Skirge01]

I've been using IR for a while now and I read something that confused me. If IR is based on what you've watched--meaning, you marked it as "watched"--and IR won't record something you've already watched, don't these two things cancel each other out?

I want to "teach" Sage what I like by marking things which have not been recorded yet as watched. But, then it won't go and record them (?!). Conversely, if I don't mark them as watched, how will Sage tell IR what to record in the first place? It seems like a catch-22.

Am I misunderstanding part of the functionality? Ultimately, it would seem that the watched flag should not be the basis for IR.

[carlgar]

I think you may be misunderstanding the use of IR. Its purpose is to record shows that you may not be aware off. If you know you want to watch a certain show it should be marked as a favorite, so it will be recorded. Then when you watch your favorites, that is when the watched flag is set that IR uses to find other shows of the same type, same stars or same station that you may be interested in. You should not have to go out of your way to train IR. Actually, you will probably find that IR will record many programs that you have no interest in and thats when the don't like flag comes into play. I use IR but very seldom have time to watch any and I just let Sage delete them when I need more space.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

...and IR won't record something you've already watched...

Just to be clear, this is not specific to IR, but applies to all automatically scheduled recordings, including Favorites. If a given episode is marked Watched, or already exists as a media file on disk (watched or unwatched), then it won't be recorded again, unless you specifically mark it for manual recording. "Watched" means watched; it's not the opposite of "Don't Like", so don't try to use it that way.

On the other hand, if what you''re trying to say is "I've already seen this episode/movie/whatever and liked it," then it's legitimate to mark it Watched and leave Don't Like turned off, in which case IR will notice your preference but won't try to record it again.

If you see things in the EPG (or the Intelligent Suggestions list) that you do want to record, either mark them for manual recording, or make Favorites of them as carlgar suggested.

[Skirge01]

Okay, thanks guys. That definitely helped clear it up. When I first started using Sage, I was still coming down from my Tivo days, so I tried to correlate the functionalities of the two systems. Clearly, my thinking was flawed and Greg said exactly what I was doing: using "Watched" as the opposite of "Don't Like". I actually went in last night and "unwatched" a large number of movies and noticed that a couple started showing up in the IR list. Thanks for setting me straight!