Buffer and recorded shows storage

[insomniac]

First off. I love this software. Very happy owner of SageTV and Client.

BUT:

I might be missing something, but is there not a way to seperate regular buffered shows from favorite shows and scheduled recorded shows?

My major hangup seems to be that the tv runs non-stop in my household, so my 100gig HD fills up quite frequently...I realize that I could sleep sage (more often) which will reduce recorded/buffered shows, but that is just a workaround to me..

Is there a way which when I schedule my recordings or turn them into favorites, that they would go to another logical location for more permanent "like" storage?

I find myself going into the my storage directly quite often and blasting out all the recorded shows from the few days b4. And if im not paying much attention to what i delete(because there is so much), I lose stuff that I wanted to keep

Basically, what I think im asking is for a more buffer like environment to be independent from the regular "keeper" storage. Is this possible already??

I.

[mandrake]

The buffered shows are deleted by sage before it deletes favorites or manual recordings so there is no need to clean out the bufferd shows

[grot]

doesn't help organizing though, if you regularly leave your tv on, you end up with 50 shows you care nothing about hiding the one or two you recorded, its a major major pain in the neck.

[insomniac]

Exactly Grot,

It becones quite tedious and time consuming to sort through my shows either manually or in the gui.

In the gui, I am forced to scan through many, many, many recorded shows (which is great, but...) btw, "One button delete" would be so awesome..

And if I am to sort manually through windows explorer, I have no way of differentiating between buffered and recorded shows, etc.

My guess is that if this were an option in sage, 95% of the people would use it

Anyone else agree with this?

I.

Originally posted by grot
doesn't help organizing though, if you regularly leave your tv on, you end up with 50 shows you care nothing about hiding the one or two you recorded, its a major major pain in the neck.

[fasttech]

Yes I agree totally. It gets rather messy with all those junk programs in there. Some categorizing into folders would be great!

[grot]

I know this is sacrilige to say this, but this is one part of the wheel that just doesn't need to be reinvented. ReplayTV has this interface issue down cold. You don't need folkders and all, you just need simplicity. My babysitter came over tonight, and I tried to explain it all to her. She had the replay down in 5 minutes, after 15 on this, i just gave up, started something she was going to watch later, pressed pause, and showed her that one thing.

[insomniac]

Not sure if I understand you correctly, but if I do...

I believe your saying that seperate buffer and recorded shows arent necessary?

My query for this functionality is not to complicate the matter at all. Matter of fact, I believe it will uncomplicate things and allow me to do everything from gui more efficiently.

This by reducing the overhead of sifting through all the junked recordings and only getting to the things that I chose/scheduled to record.

Meanwhile, In the back-end, if I choose to completely blow away the said "buffer" directory, I have no fear or energy spent on sifting through 100 gigs of stuff.

Am I just crazy?

I.

Originally posted by grot
I know this is sacrilige to say this, but this is one part of the wheel that just doesn't need to be reinvented. ReplayTV has this interface issue down cold. You don't need folkders and all, you just need simplicity. My babysitter came over tonight, and I tried to explain it all to her. She had the replay down in 5 minutes, after 15 on this, i just gave up, started something she was going to watch later, pressed pause, and showed her that one thing.

[justme]

I'm not totally sure I understand this topic. I realize the buffer shows show up but, if I go in to GUIDE>SAGE RCORDINGS the buffer shows are all at the bottom of the list. My "manually recorded" shows are first then "favorites" then "Intelligent Recordings" and lastly "buffer" shows. By turning on autocatorization I find it quite managable.

Possible compromise?:
How about adding an option to the properties file to only display X number of buffer shows in the Sage Guide say(0 to 5). They should still be kept on the disk though. They could be accessed through a new button added in the "GUIDE" button group. ie GUIDE>BUFFER SHOWS You could also add an option to clear all the buffer shows once you are inside this new "buffer" group.

It seems to me to adress the clutter issue. You could set the new properties option to 0 to keep clutter to a minimum.
If you like to delete buffer shows you could get all of them from one group. This way you would know you were only deleting buffer shows.
For others a setting of 2 or 3 would be fine. Less clutter but you still have all the shows available in the "Buffer Shows" group if you want them.

What do you think of this as a compromise? Narflex?

[insomniac]

Potatoe, patato. Either works for me. as long as I can seperate my buffered shows from my recorded shows, I would be happy.

Although I would prefer my suggestion over this one(which is a good one) just because I would like the ability to go into the "buffer" directory and blast away everything at once w/o worry that I just killed all my favorites, etc..

Other than that.....Narflex?

Originally posted by justme
I'm not totally sure I understand this topic. I realize the buffer shows show up but, if I go in to GUIDE>SAGE RCORDINGS the buffer shows are all at the bottom of the list. My "manually recorded" shows are first then "favorites" then "Intelligent Recordings" and lastly "buffer" shows. By turning on autocatorization I find it quite managable.

Possible compromise?:
How about adding an option to the properties file to only display X number of buffer shows in the Sage Guide say(0 to 5). They should still be kept on the disk though. They could be accessed through a new button added in the "GUIDE" button group. ie GUIDE>BUFFER SHOWS You could also add an option to clear all the buffer shows once you are inside this new "buffer" group.

It seems to me to adress the clutter issue. You could set the new properties option to 0 to keep clutter to a minimum.
If you like to delete buffer shows you could get all of them from one group. This way you would know you were only deleting buffer shows.
For others a setting of 2 or 3 would be fine. Less clutter but you still have all the shows available in the "Buffer Shows" group if you want them.

What do you think of this as a compromise? Narflex?

[justme]

If you are talking about this

"One button delete" would be so awesome..

I agree.

It's just that I feel you should have to actually go in to the theorical "Buffer Group", before you have the option to select "Delete all buffer shows in this group". Just for confirmation purposes. I wasn't quite sure how to describe all this, but it seems like this is a feature(buffer kill) that is desired by a lot of users. So hopefully Narflex will add this potato or potatoe.

[Narflex]

I am aware of this 'problem' as you probably imagine. I accounted for it in the design of SageTV. And here's how the current software that you're using solves it:

When the user is watching live TV; Sage is going to record everything they're watching and add it to the Sage Recordings list. This may be annoying to some users, and others may find it of benefit to be able to go back to things they've just watched.

One of the general principles that Sage uses is that it makes full use of the diskspace that is given to it. So when making decisions about how the software should behave; this is the scenario that is most often used. And if you have Intelligent Recording enabled, this should more or less always be true, because in that case SageTV will always be recording new things that will keep your disk full.

When you're watching live TV. Everything you watch gets added to the SageRecordings list; but it also gets marked as 'Watched'. This puts it at the bottom of the list; and it will be deleted in the near future when SageTV needs more diskspace. When watching live TV, you can't watch more than can be recorded, so the amount of this buffer should never grow to more than a couple of shows. This is because Sage will keep needing more diskspace as it keeps recording, and it will then delete the stuff you've just watched.

Essentially you're manually interfering in SageTV's automated intelligent process of how it manages diskspace. If you didn't manually delete stuff, you wouldn't have a problem. This is due to one of the basic principles of Sage's diskspace management which is not to delete something unless the diskspace is needed for something.


This doesn't mean that your feature request isn't valid, because I agree it is different from what I describe here. But I wanted to explain to you an alternative solution to the problem based on how I planned for it.

Thanks.

[grot]

OK, I get this. But how do I make sure something WON'T be deleted other than moving it to the library. Part of the problem is that because I can't say "keep 3 shows" or something equivalent, I get a TON of stuff recorded.

To be sepecific, right now I have maybe 4 or 5 kids programs i keep recorded for my daughter. Ideally, I would just like to keep two recent episodes of each, so that there was always something new on in each one. Because of the way shows are reported in XMLTV (and the fact that alot of this stuff is always marked reruns), I have to record all episodes of each.

Many of these shows run multiple times a day, on multiple stations. The end result is that if I go away for two days, I come home to a dozen of each show having been recorded, plus the few things I have moved to the "library" to make sure they didn't get deleted (favorite shows she wants to revisit).

This could be solved if it reliably used folders, but it doesn't. There seems to be no logic to whether "Stanley" is in a folder with 3 other stanleys, whether its all by itself, or whether its lumped in with a lot of accidentally recorded stuff under "Childrens Disney".

I'm all for having it record everything. Just wish it all made more sense on the screen.

[insomniac]

Jeff,

I understand your point and the logic behind it. From what I read, it seems that most recordings will end up staying around if I do everything through the GUI.

I can say that if I had an option to not show(or to click another radio button to expand buffered shows and see whats in there), I would love it

e.g.

Live TV
Sage Recordings
Buffered Shows
Sage1
Sage2

This way I would not have to click down or up 100 times, through 140 gigs of shows to see the guide.

How do you feel about "one touch delete" also? as an option?

By all means, please dont take this stuff as criticism. I am very happy with sage and would just love to help with ideas (good or bad) to make it more functional, etc.

I cant wait to hear that you all get very rich from making such a cool product!

I.

Originally posted by Narflex
I am aware of this 'problem' as you probably imagine. I accounted for it in the design of SageTV. And here's how the current software that you're using solves it:

When the user is watching live TV; Sage is going to record everything they're watching and add it to the Sage Recordings list. This may be annoying to some users, and others may find it of benefit to be able to go back to things they've just watched.

One of the general principles that Sage uses is that it makes full use of the diskspace that is given to it. So when making decisions about how the software should behave; this is the scenario that is most often used. And if you have Intelligent Recording enabled, this should more or less always be true, because in that case SageTV will always be recording new things that will keep your disk full.

When you're watching live TV. Everything you watch gets added to the SageRecordings list; but it also gets marked as 'Watched'. This puts it at the bottom of the list; and it will be deleted in the near future when SageTV needs more diskspace. When watching live TV, you can't watch more than can be recorded, so the amount of this buffer should never grow to more than a couple of shows. This is because Sage will keep needing more diskspace as it keeps recording, and it will then delete the stuff you've just watched.

Essentially you're manually interfering in SageTV's automated intelligent process of how it manages diskspace. If you didn't manually delete stuff, you wouldn't have a problem. This is due to one of the basic principles of Sage's diskspace management which is not to delete something unless the diskspace is needed for something.


This doesn't mean that your feature request isn't valid, because I agree it is different from what I describe here. But I wanted to explain to you an alternative solution to the problem based on how I planned for it.

Thanks.

[JasonJoel]

I think Jeff has heard two things loud and clear from this and other threads:

1. A number of users want to be able to filter out 'non-asked for' recordings from their Favorite/Manual recordings. Whether done in separate views, or with filters in one view is open for discussion.

2. A number of users would like to be able to place limits on a per show basis to the number of retained episodes. I.e. being able to say 'only keep X shows'.

I'm sure he will consider these requests/suggestions and do what he can with them. I just keep seeing these two requests over and over, so figured I would summarize them here for clarity.

Go Jeff Go! Still loving the recording time padding!

Jason

[justme]

Yeah don't feel like we are attacking. I love this software and actually I'm fine with it's current buffer behaviour. I just thought I'd put forward my version of a compromise since this issue does keep coming up.

Maybe Narflex could set up a thread that lists feature requests and if they are on the to do list. You could put features that are about to be implimented at the top. If he is too busy too maintain it, he could select a reliable user to manage it. The thread should alsways start with the list, which should be locked except for the person who is managing it. Then every one could check this list to see where things stand before starting the same conversation over again. There could be periodic polls on a select group of most needed features. If a feature is not listed then a post could be added and the list updated.

Sigh, I guess this is a feature request as well. It never ends.

Like I said before there is something about this software/community that makes a person want to participate.

[Mark Lamutt]

OK, that sounds like a good idea. I'll set up the Official Sage_____ Feature Requests thread in the SageTV and SageRecorder forums.

[-LD]

how about an option to specify how much space the user wants for buffered recordings?

that way a user could set up their 100GB drive to have 80GB for their favorites and 20GB for buffered recordings for example

SageTV is smart enough to manage that by itself, but i think some users might like that option

also, i think a better display, as others have mentioned, is needed so i don't have to sift through 20 buffered recordings just to find the one thing i wanted to record...i like insomniac's suggestion of an option to show or not show buffered recordings as well as have them categorized into one place...that would clean matters up and allow for constant, intelligent recording without the hassle of having to sift through buffered programs