Sage behavior when limiting the number of favorites.

[BrettS]

My Sage system is distributed among 4 TV's and used by 6 people in my household. Most of them are not terribly computer or DVR literate, so I'm trying to make things as easy as possible for them.

Originally, I had my favorites configured for AutoDelete, but this wasn't working well because a lot of people in the household like the same shows, but they don't watch them at the same time. So one person was watching a favorite, it would get marked as watched, and then almost immediately deleted (I have intellegent recording turned on and would prefer to leave it on, so my drive is always full, but most of it is IR shows).

I could ask people to mark shows as unwatched after they finish watching them, but realistically that's not going to happen 90% of the time.

In an attempt to fix this I turned off AutoDelete and set my favorites to keep at most 7 episodes. This worked well and no one's shows got automatically deleted, but I've discovered a new problem. I had assumed that after 7 episodes of a particular favorite had been recorded and a new episode was coming on that Sage would delete the oldest episode and record the new episode, so it always the 7 most recent episodes available. This way people don't need to worry about deleting any shows, since they may not know if everyone has watched a particular show.

Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be happening. Once 7 episodes of a favorite have been recorded Sage will no longer record any eposides until one (or more) have been deleted. This is now causing people to miss their shows because the episodes simply don't get recorded.

Is there any option for a hybrid AutoDelete/Keep at Most option that would allow me to save the most recent X number of episodes of a favorite, yet still allow it to automatically delete the older episodes to make room for new ones?

Thanks,
Brett

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by BrettS

... I turned off AutoDelete and set my favorites to keep at most 7 episodes. ... Once 7 episodes of a favorite have been recorded Sage will no longer record any eposides until one (or more) have been deleted.
...
Is there any option for a hybrid AutoDelete/Keep at Most option that would allow me to save the most recent X number of episodes of a favorite, yet still allow it to automatically delete the older episodes to make room for new ones?

Turn autodelete back on. You told SageTV that it isn't allowed to delete the recordings. (Pages 69 & 70 in the PDF manual.)

However, it will still delete watched shows first. If you don't want them deleted automatically at all, then you would need to keep autodelete off.

- Andy

[BrettS]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Turn autodelete back on. You told SageTV that it isn't allowed to delete the recordings. (Pages 69 & 70 in the PDF manual.)

- Andy

Yeah, but if I turn AutoDelete back on it will delete watched favorites almost immediately after watching them because the drive is full of IR shows... and as discussed earlier in another thread, unwatched IR shows have priority over watched favorites.

Of course, I could turn off IR, but I actually like the feature and would really prefer to leave it on.

That's why I'm looking for more of a hybrid AutoDelete... I don't want it to delete a favorite just to gain space for other recordings and I still want to limit the maximum number of episodes of each favorite, but do want it to delete old episodes of each favorite to allow it to always have the X most recent episodes. If people haven't seen their show in 7 weeks, then it's their own fault for missing it.

FWIW, this is the way the Tivo I replaced with Sage worked, and I think it actually worked quite nicely.

[Opus4]

You must have quoted & started your reply before I added another line, above. That's currently the way SageTV works, so you would either have to do what you said about clearing the Watched flag or keep autodelete turned off & make sure you delete shows to make room for more. You could remove the Fav limit so it will always record more if there are IR shows that can be deleted.

- Andy

[BrettS]

Thanks for the reply, but unfortunately none of those are great options for me. I was rather hoping there was a setting somewhere I had missed, but clearly that doesn't seem to be the case. How would I go about formally submitting a feature request?

Thanks again

Brett

[tchapin]

I don't recall Tivo working that way, but it's been about 4 years since I switched to Sage, so I could be mistaken.

Is there a way to limit the # of hours that IR recordings take up? Perhaps instead of "all free space" it can be limited to X GB?

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by BrettS

How would I go about formally submitting a feature request?

You can use the support request form for that.

But it seems to me the feature you're really wishing for is not another variation on Autodelete. It's that recordings shouldn't get marked Watched until everybody who cares to has watched them. Then the current meaning of Autodelete would do exactly what you want.

[BrettS]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

But it seems to me the feature you're really wishing for is not another variation on Autodelete. It's that recordings shouldn't get marked Watched until everybody who cares to has watched them. Then the current meaning of Autodelete would do exactly what you want.

That might be true, but it would be pretty impressive if Sage could figure out just how many times a show needs to be watched before it sets the watched flag Heck... even telling Sage not to automatically set shows as watched and trying to manually set the flag wouldn't work because people don't always know if they're the last one to watch a particular show.

Like I said, the best solution I can see is to limit a favorite to a particular number of recordings, but I want them to be the most recent episodes... not just the ones that haven't been manually deleted yet.

Thanks for the link, though

Brett

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by BrettS

Heck... even telling Sage not to automatically set shows as watched and trying to manually set the flag wouldn't work because people don't always know if they're the last one to watch a particular show.

They wouldn't have to know, if Sage could keep count of how many times it's been watched, and not delete it until that count reaches some specified number.

But the real point is that there could be a number of possible workarounds for a given issue, including some you probably haven't thought of. So I find that instead of wishing for the specific workaround I did happen to think of, it's more useful to try to identify the root cause of a problem (e.g. the Watched flag doesn't properly account for different family members watching separately, so that things become vulnerable to deletion before everyone has a chance to watch them) and see what kinds of ideas people have about that.

[ThePaladinTech]

Well Brett I agree with you- I submitted a feature request as well. my submission suggested that they make it an option- "classic style" watched shows deleted first regardless of why they were recorded or "User Priority" IR shows have lowest priority (watched IR very first, unwatched IR Second, Watched User third)

It wouldn't surprise me if one of the many fantastic community programmers here do this before sage themselves - if you look at the ortus project (which is in Development now) it will due just what you want and more. (in fact one wonders if Ortus is Sage7 ... )

[BrettS]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

They wouldn't have to know, if Sage could keep count of how many times it's been watched, and not delete it until that count reaches some specified number.

But the real point is that there could be a number of possible workarounds for a given issue, including some you probably haven't thought of. So I find that instead of wishing for the specific workaround I did happen to think of, it's more useful to try to identify the root cause of a problem (e.g. the Watched flag doesn't properly account for different family members watching separately, so that things become vulnerable to deletion before everyone has a chance to watch them) and see what kinds of ideas people have about that.

I'm sorry Greg, I certainly didn't mean to imply that I'm against finding other solutions, but unfortunately your suggestion simply isn't feasible in my case. I have some shows that only 1 or 2 people like to watch and some shows that 3 or 4 people watch and some that all 6 people watch. Even if I could set a "number of watches" per show it wouldn't work because sometimes people will sit together as a group to watch the show. So something like the Amazing Race that we all like to watch might be watched 6 different times if we're all busy one week, or we might all sit down together and watch it once and be done with it. Or maybe 3 of us will watch it together, but then it will be watched another 3 times individually. There's just no accurate way to predict how many times a show needs to be watched before everyone in the household is done with it.

Now, that said, I'm certainly not tied to the solution I suggested, and frankly, it does have some downsides as well... Once everyone does watch a show then it could be deleted, and if not then it's just going to be taking up disk space that could be used for other things. However, by limiting a specific favorite to a certain number of new episodes and allowing older ones to be automatically deleted seems like a pretty good compromise in my book. People will know they have several weeks to catch up on any shows they like to watch, but I don't have to worry about recordings taking up disk space indefinitely.

Another good use of the feature I suggested is with the news. Occasionally we like to watch the local news, but certainly not every night, and of course, Sage has spoiled us, so we rarely watch it live too. But news spoils pretty quickly, so I'd love to be able to tell Sage to only keep the one most recent recording of the local news we like. Then, if we watch to catch up on the local news we can go and we'll always have the most recent one. But we have no need for more than the most recent recording and we certainly don't watch it daily, so I don't want to go in and delete it or mark it as watched every day.

One of the reasons I posted this message here was to see if anyone else has come up with a good solution (or workaround) for this problem, because I'll freely admit that I haven't thought of everything

[BrettS]

Originally Posted by enzominator

Well Brett I agree with you- I submitted a feature request as well. my submission suggested that they make it an option- "classic style" watched shows deleted first regardless of why they were recorded or "User Priority" IR shows have lowest priority (watched IR very first, unwatched IR Second, Watched User third)

Thanks for the suggestion and I'm really not trying to be totally negative about other people's ideas here, but the "User Priority" method that you suggest above is similar to the way the Tivo works... the shows that it picks to record have the lowest priority and having used a Tivo for some time I can tell you that what will happen with that method is that after a few weeks or maybe a few months, depending on how much disk space you have, your favorites (watched and all) will take up all of your disk space and there will be no more room for the lower priority IR shows. Unless something is done to prune the favorites (either manually deleting shows after you've watched them, allowing sage to delete the watched ones as it does now, or allowing sage to delete older episodes to make room for new ones) your favorites will just keep expanding until it pushes out all of the IR's.

[BrettS]

I did actually just have another thought that's similar to what I suggested above, but not quite the same. What if we could give each show an 'expiration' date. Leave AutoDelete on, but tell Sage that watched or not this show can't be AutoDeleted for X number of days. I'm thinking this would be an option when you set up a favorite. Every show recorded by that favorite rule would have it's expiration date determined by the setting in that rule. That way I could give the news a short expiration date and older recordings would go away pretty quickly, but the other shows that everyone likes could have an expiration date of several weeks.

Again, that way I know that the shows people like to watch will be there long enough for them to watch, but I still don't have to worry about deleting shows when everyone is done with them... I know that eventually they will get deleted.

Maybe for even more flexibility, allow each show to have two expiration dates... a shorter one for watched shows and a longer one for unwatched shows. That probably wouldn't be necessary in my situation and I would be inclined to set them both to the same value, however, I can certainly see where other people might find the ability to give watched and unwatched shows different lifetimes to be useful.

[ThePaladinTech]

Originally Posted by BrettS

Thanks for the suggestion and I'm really not trying to be totally negative about other people's ideas here, but the "User Priority" method that you suggest above is similar to the way the Tivo works... the shows that it picks to record have the lowest priority and having used a Tivo for some time I can tell you that what will happen with that method is that after a few weeks or maybe a few months, depending on how much disk space you have, your favorites (watched and all) will take up all of your disk space and there will be no more room for the lower priority IR shows. Unless something is done to prune the favorites (either manually deleting shows after you've watched them, allowing sage to delete the watched ones as it does now, or allowing sage to delete older episodes to make room for new ones) your favorites will just keep expanding until it pushes out all of the IR's.

I know I was agreeing with you and also filed out a suggestion form for sage to implement that. I too have a Tivo and I know that's how it works. on the Tivo I actually use 'tivo suggestions' as a gas gauge-- since tivo doesn't handily have a was to tell you how much free space you have. And in my suggestion I called it "user priority" as I doubt Sage would be able to roll it out calling it "tivo style"

[tchapin]

Yeah, in migrating over from Tivo, I was surprised that IR recordings have a higher priority than watched manual / favorite recordings.

As for your news program, is that watched by everyone, or just you?

It seems a the moment that to solve your problem you have to train people to unset the watched flag after watching. That way, you could set the shows to keep say 7, auto delete as needed, but since they are always flagged unwatched, IR will have lower priority until another episode of the show comes on.

Hey, could Sage Job Queue be used to do that?

I posted a question about this in the Sage Customizations forum.

[BrettS]

Originally Posted by tchapin

It seems a the moment that to solve your problem you have to train people to unset the watched flag after watching.

That might help, although, given the people I'm working with here I don't think I have much of a chance. I've been using Sage for several months now and I'm still working on training one of the people on how to find shows that have already been recorded. And she's 29 too... she should be able to handle this

But to be perfectly honest, as I think about it more, I'm not sure that even that would be an ideal solution, since the shows that are now no longer marked watched would still never get deleted. It would solve the issue of people's shows disappearing as soon as they were watched, but it would still cause an issue with disk space and the loss of space for IR as time went on unless someone (me) went through periodically and deleted older shows... and that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid.

Hey, could Sage Job Queue be used to do that?

I don't really know anything about Sage Job Queue, but I'm wondering if it could actually be used to delete the older shows.

I'm thinking ideally it could look at the settings for the favorites and see how many episodes it's set to keep at most. Then, check to see how many episodes of a show currently exist. If the numbers are the same, then delete the oldest episode of the show. That way there would always be one less show than the maximum number, so Sage would always be able to record the new ones. I'd have to set the 'keep at most' number to one more than I actually want to keep, but it could be a nice solution it if works.

Is that something the Sage Job Queue might actually be able to do?

[tchapin]

Hey Brett,

I got a response from the SageJobQueue dev, Slugger.

Looks like the answer is yes, but with one caveat. Go check it out.

Good luck.

Todd