How can #1 on priority list get bumped due to conflict

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by spacecadet

Don't think I can use the time slot trick for the Sox since the games replay about 4x over the next 24 hour period (so there's more replays avoid than just the 12am slot - although this is a great suggestion).

My concern with the Sox is that I do have a free tuner during this time slot. But it's an SD tuner and Sage ignores it because the later airing is in HD. Even if there were a way to say: "I don't care about HD for this favorite" so that the SD tuner will get used when there is a conflict on the HD tuner - that would go a long way towards not having to massage the recording schedule.

Well, you could set that favorite to only record on the SD channel (of course then you would never get the HD version).

I think you could also create 2 favorites - one that is limited to the SD channel only and one that is limited to the HD channel only. If you do this you will end up with extra recordings that you will have to delete, and you will be tying up your tuners more than you need to, but you can be sure it won't wait to record the HD version when an SD is available anymore.

[spacecadet]

Originally Posted by Tiki

I think you could also create 2 favorites - one that is limited to the SD channel only and one that is limited to the HD channel only. If you do this you will end up with extra recordings that you will have to delete, and you will be tying up your tuners more than you need to, but you can be sure it won't wait to record the HD version when an SD is available anymore.

I don't *think* this will work, but I'll give it a shot once baseball season kicks off in another month or two.

I suspect since HD/SD have the same airing ID, that Sage will still try and grab the HD version even though the SD favorite is present. But I'll definitely give it a shot. Thanks for the tip!

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Just keep in mind that sage is programming this way for a reason, and forcing a show to record when sage wasn't planning on recording it will result in a different favorite being missed. Obviously, for sporting events, you always want to do this - luckily, with football, there are no re-airs to complicate matters. For other shows, though, i never see the need to get the 1st airing, if it means sage will be able to record everything i want doing it it's own way. I always have a backlog of shows to watch, so it's not like I'd be getting to the show the first night anyways.

The kid can miss a rerun of her show so the rest of us can get the first airing of a favorite family SyFy show.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

The kid can miss a rerun of her show so the rest of us can get the first airing of a favorite family SyFy show.

My piont was, I'm usually watching my SyFy shows (or other) about a week or so behind - and for me, they all get recorded before I watch them.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

My piont was, I'm usually watching my SyFy shows (or other) about a week or so behind - and for me, they all get recorded before I watch them.

For our family favorites it's pretty important that they're recorded at the first showing.

[Fuzzy]

Manual's your best bet then. It's really not that tough to go through once every couple weeks, check the future airings, and hit the REC button on the first occurance of each. The fact is, it's not of that high of a demand for it to be made into a plugin, and since it will only have a tendency towards causing more missed recordings, I doubt sage would be interested in it.

[gabrielcab]

I'm with the "ALWAYS USE FIRST AVAILABLE AIRING" button team, if it can be separated into people who cares into give priority over first time airings and people who don't.

[Fuzzy]

Then I nominate you to make a plugin to do it.. :-) That's how sage works...

[Slugger]

Here's my contribution: Run this groovy script every few hours via SJQv4's crontab (or any cron/scheduler service) and it will mark the first airing of favourites tagged with the "AlwaysRecFirstAiring" property as a manual recording, ensuring that the first airing of said favourites always gets recorded.

This is an example of how you get things done when the core doesn't quite do what you want it to: write a script/plugin/whatever that makes Sage do what you want.

def testMode = true

FavoriteAPI.GetFavorites().each {
   if(Boolean.parseBoolean(FavoriteAPI.GetFavoriteProperty(it, "AlwaysRecFirstAiring"))) {
      def processed = [:]
      Database.Sort(Database.FilterByRange(FavoriteAPI.GetFavoriteAirings(it), "GetAiringStartTime", System.currentTimeMillis(), Long.MAX_VALUE, true), false, "GetAiringStartTime").each {
          def showEID = ShowAPI.GetShowExternalID(it)
          if(processed[showEID] == null) {
              processed[showEID] = true
              if(!testMode && !AiringAPI.IsManualRecord(it))
                  AiringAPI.Record(it)
              else if(testMode)
                  println "Would mark airing of '${ShowAPI.GetShowTitle(it)}' on ${new Date(AiringAPI.GetAiringStartTime(it))} as manual recording!"
          }
      }
   }
}
return 0

NOTE: This solution is a Groovy script that relies on being run in an environment capable of supporting it. That environment is either SJQv4 or running it manually via the SageGroovy IDE/command line. The SJQv4 env is, as you can see, pretty powerful. A simple 18 line script and ~15 minutes of effort is all it took to solve this problem.

If you don't want to use SJQv4 to do this, simply port the above Groovy script to Java and install this as a plugin that spawns a thread and runs this algorithm every few hours.