Continous 4 hr live TV

[rak306]

I want to limit my HD disk usage to about 6 hrs (~one evening), and basically be able to view whatever channel the pvr-250 was set to any time during the last few hrs. I am not interested is recording anything. Just live TV, and history of the last few hrs.

When I setup the video storage area, and limit the usage to 1 gig (for testing), I eventually get a warning, no more disk space, must stop recording.

I thought SageTV could manage live TV and would just erase the old data when it ran out of room on disk.

Rick

[mlbdude]

It manages old complete recordings. In practice you need enough storage to record the the longest show you are going to watch. This becomes difficult with something like Headline News that plays in 7 hour blocks.

[Opus4]

With only 1GB allocated, you probbaly don't even have enough room to record 1 show, so it can't complete the current recording & there isn't anything else to delete.

-A ndy

[m1ketuck]

i think the point he was making was that he would expect the live tv buffer to stay at 1gb and the oldest 5min be replaced by the newest 5 min

if this can only be done by deleting a whole complete program from the live tv buffer this could cause some problems depend on the current program in live buffer.

an additional question for me would be if i had two tuners will the system be continously recording two channels even if there are no recordings scheduled? or does the IR just cherry pick chosen programs?

cheers mike

[carlgar]

The SageTV manual recommended a minimum 20 GB Free disk for video storage.
SageTV does not use a buffer, each show is recorded into its own file. Previously recorded shows are deleted when more space is required.

With 1 or more tuners IR does try to keep the tuners busy by recording any show it thinks you may have an interest in. I disabled this this feature very quickly, because it was recording way too many shows for me and overwriting unwatched programs. I just use favorites and manual recordings now and can just barely keep up with what I record (about 18 programs a day).

[stanger89]

Sage records on a per-show basis so if there isn't enough room for one show, you'll probably see errors.

If that's what you want to do you'd need to set Sage to use about 12Gb at the 2Gb/hr setting.

[stanger89]

Originally posted by m1ketuck
an additional question for me would be if i had two tuners will the system be continously recording two channels even if there are no recordings scheduled? or does the IR just cherry pick chosen programs?

cheers mike

In general, Sage only records continuously if you leave Sage while watching/recording LiveTV. If you put Sage to sleep when you aren't using it, it will only record scheduled programs, which includes IR if you have it enabled.

As for IR, it chooses programs based on what you've watched and marked as "Don't Like." With judicious use of "Don't Like" you can train IR to be quite intelligent. For the first few days Sage tries to record everything, but it gets much better before too long. I have IR trained well enough that it only picks out about 5-10 shows per week.