Be careful with "Favorites"!

[mdmint]

After completing my storage upgrade yesterday morning one of the 5 concurrent test records I fired off was The Adams Family. (I just quickly setup 5 half hour shows to record, didn't care what for the test) After they finished recording I went and played portions of each to make sure they recorded without any pauses/skips etc. No problem. However, Debi saw Adams Family on the tube and decided it'd be fun to record. Ok, set is as a favorite at 1pm PDT yesterday. About 20hrs later Sage is recording the 34th unique 1/2hr episode!

But that's ok. Right now most of the shows we'd be recording are in reruns and storage space shouldn't be an issue for quite some time.

[Opus4]

Simply set your favorite to "Keep At Most" N episodes. Of course, it also has to be set to enable autodelete or else they will still continue to accumulate. Edit: And, it will still try to record every episode you haven't yet watched, deleting the old ones as newer ones come along.

- Andy

[mdmint]

Thanks for the tip. I actually already knew about those settings and intentially turn off auto-delete and don't limit the number of shows though. My post was mostly in facetious jest, illustrating how easy SageTV is to use but if not careful how fast storage could be used up. If someone had a relatively small amount of storage it could be a problem. Fortunately still well over a TB left available for now!

[Opus4]

Well... if you really want to fill up that TB quickly, simply turn on Intelligent Recording...

- Andy

[mdmint]

Originally posted by Opus4
Well... if you really want to fill up that TB quickly, simply turn on Intelligent Recording...

- Andy

That's a "scary" feature I haven't played with (yet)! This past couple weeks is my first usage of SageTV and figured to use it awhile before playing with that feature. Will likely in another couple weeks while it's still summer and mostly rerun time. Could be interesting to see what Sage decides to record for us!

[Opus4]

Originally posted by mdmint
Could be interesting to see what Sage decides to record for us!

I'll give you a warning: unless you like the Lifetime channel, remove it from the lineup before enabling IR... SageTV's IR _really_ likes that channel for some reason.

Also, at first it will record nearly anything & everything. Simply go through the scheduled recording list & mark the ones you don't want as "don't like". And, make sure the shows you have watched & liked are marked 'watched' so that IR knows you like that one. If you ever watch a new genre (kids shows on Nick or Disney, for example), be prepared to be inundated with IR recordings fro that genre.

Finally, IR actually work better for often aired shows than does setting a favorite -- it will record the ones it can w/o generating conflicts for those that interfere with other shows. On the other hand, if you _have_ to have every episode, a fav still is best.

- Andy

[FamilyMan]

If you ever want to know what the IR feature would record without actually turning it on, just add the "scheduler_export_file" property to your Sage.properties file.
Just shutdown Sage and then add then property to the Sage.properties file. Here is what the line looks like in my Sage.properties:

scheduler_export_file=E\:\\Program Files\\Frey Technologies\\SageTV\\sched.txt

It's a tab delimited text file so it's pretty easy to parse. Each line has nine "fields:"

Encoder - Name of encoder/tuner doing the recording
Start Time - Time show will start in ddd mm/dd hh24:mm format
Stop Time - Time show will end in ddd mm/dd hh24:mm format
Duration - Length of show in hh24:mm format
ChannelName - Channel call sign
ChannelNum - Channel Number
Title - Title of show
ManualRecord - "true" if show is a manual record, "false" if it isn't
Favorite - "true" if show is a favorite, "false" if it isn't

Those last two fields are important because this file lists IR recordings even if you have IR disabled. You can tell IR recordings because ManualRecord and Favorite are both "false."

Once Sage it restarted it will dump the entire upcoming schedule into the file assigned to the property. Just open the file in NotePad.

[mpcrider]

I made the mistake of just deleting episodes of my Favorites that I'd already seen (pre-Sage) and Sage, behaving like the good program that it is, just re-recorded them. So don't make my mistake and flag them as watched before you delete them.

[Vex]

Also, at first it will record nearly anything & everything. Simply go through the scheduled recording list & mark the ones you don't want as "don't like". And, make sure the shows you

My SageTV doesn't seem to pay any attention to any "don't likes" I enter. For example, I've set a "don't like" multiple times for "Totally Nascar" on ESPN, and IR just keeps trying to pick it up at different time slots. I've also noticed that it often picks up "Paid Programming" on various channels and at various times, no matter how many times I go and set them as "don't like". If a "don't like" setting is only useful for a specific show at a specific timeslot, that is pretty useless. If I don't like racing Wednesdays at 9, then I still won't like it on Friday, either...

[Opus4]

Check: SageTV Configuration Properties. There is a property:

aggressive_negative_profiling - if enabled, Intelligent Recording will try harder to understand what the user doesn't like

You can try setting it to true (while SageTV is not running at all, not even sleeping).

Otherwise, I go in & look for all future airings & mark them all as Don't Like to really knock it over the head. I'm told that is not the proper way to use IR, though.

Edit: Oh yeah... don't use BOTH the property & marking all future airings as Don't LIke. They don't play well together & you'll get almost NO IR shows. Trust me.

- Andy