On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 01:15:52PM -0800, Bruce Markey wrote:
Brad Templeton wrote: ...
Of course, I have lived happily on a 1 tuner Tivo before trying to build my mythbox which will have two tuners, a pcHDTV and a wintv-150. I sort of feel that a scheduling conflict is god's way of telling me I watch too much TV.
God probably didn't tell networks to pit shows that appeal to the same demographic against each other in order to undermine the Nielsen ratings of their competitors =).
on at 8:00pm Tuesday we most want to watch. However, there may be four things on at 8pm Tue that I'd prefer over almost anything else on at any other time of the week. So the advantage of
This can be true in theory, and sometimes in practice, but how true is it really?
That's a good question and one that surprised me once I had
several tuners.
Sometimes I feel the right answer is to just accept it, and that week watch only one thing. You should never watch an inferior thing to fill your time just because you couldn't record a superior thing.
Agreed. Following that line of reasoning, it turns out that most of the time there isn't anything on that I really need to see and often superior things are on at the same time. The question changes from 'what will fit in the schedule' to 'what are the things I'd most like to see'. If that means that several things are recorded on Tuesday and nothing on Friday, so be it.
Chances are, it will come on again (if it's not a sporting event.) A clever PVR might even notice when it failed to record something due to conflicts, and remember to grab it for you in summer reruns (while not recording all the other reruns.) Ie. add it to a permanent wishlist of sorts.
Myth shines here because unlike the system you are familiar with where previously recorded shows are only remembered for 5 or 6 weeks and a first run feature is used to block reruns, myth keeps it's previously recorded entries. It will remember which ones you've seen before and only record the ones that were missed. It's also a little smarted about letting you block out a showing but still allowing that same episode to be recorded at another time.
But I'm not like many. When I got my Tivo I did watch more TV, even accounting for the fact that I could watch TV in 30% less time due to commercial skip. It took effort to bring it back down. Tivo suggestions are an interesting feature but can contribute to more watching. On the other hand you can be bothered by the lack of variety without them and start surfing, which is of course bad (and very slow with digital TV.)
Variety is a good question or at least seems like a good question when watching recordings rather than channel surfing. I thought the suggestions were an interesting feature at first as well as the promotional lists. However, The first week I said I liked Letterman and it suggested another talk show, Oprah. I said no to Oprah and a week later it recommended Letterman and not Oprah. Three months later Letterman yes, Oprah no. I'm fairly confident of it's talk show recommendations for next year.
But I found that I kept looking at these lists and came to realize that what I was looking for was not the regular series that I'd already formed an opinion about but the new titles I hadn't heard of before(!). This lead to the What's New list now in Schedule Recordings->Search Lists->New Titles. This is a slightly different approach where there is a table of all the titles that have been in the listings in the past (up to 11 months) then the New Titles show all the future titles in the current listings that are not in that list. So this is all the stuff that hasn't been on before. Further, by using the view keys, Home and End by default, you can see the list broken down by Movies, Series and Specials. I've found many more interesting, unexpected things by looking at these lists than I ever found in the suggestions. I also believe I find more interesting things here than by channel surfing because you only find things that happen to be on during the times that you surf and even then you start watching from somewhere in the middle.
But for example, I deliberately don't get HBO, even though it has shows I would like to see, because I know I would watch more of it than I should. (This decision was reinforced when comcast switched to requiring digital cable to get pay channels. PVRs work much better with broadband RF style cable than with set top boxes, as we all know.)
I agree that they do but I'm not sure everyone knows that ;-).
So I agree, sometimes multiple tuners will give you better quality TV. But they will also make you -- at least if you are weak like me -- from thinking about the decisions over what you really want to watch.
Glad you said that because it shows that I failed to express the key point. Shortly before I had a DVR I was in the habit of watching Dragnet at 6:30 before dinner. As I scheduled things on the DVR I of course added Dragnet and started piling up episodes as I watched other things. I finally had to come to grips with the fact that I didn't need to record or watch Dragnet. The only reason that I was watching it was because that was what was on at 6:30. I could watch other stuff before dinner.
Now with multiple tuners you can take time and choice further. I've watched Nova for decades and is probably my all time favorite show. I now like reality shows like Survivor, Apprentice, Rebel Billionaire, Biggest Loser, even this new The Real Gilligan's Island. I'd like to watch all six of these shows (and not Dragnet BTW ;-) each week. Other than Survivor and Apprentice on Thursday, the other four are all at 8:00 on Tuesday. There's nothing I want to see on Friday so why shouldn't I be able to watch another of these Tuesday shows on Friday? So as far as thinking about the decisions over what you really want to watch, that decision becomes more about what you really want to see and less about what compromises you need to make in order for things to fit.
One thing multiple tuners can do though is facilitate automatic padding.
All PVRs should automatically pad a few minutes extra before and after
each program. The before-padding would be invisible -- the cursor would
start at the programmed start time, and a few minutes of rewind would be
available. The post-padding of course is not watched because you manually
stop at the end.
Myth had two different concepts for padding that are not intertwined
but are often confused. First, on the options page for any record
rule, minutes can be added or subtracted from the beginning and the
end. This information is used bu the scheduler in planning the schedule
and is always honored. If this creates more conflicts than tuners,
a show will not record if it cannot fit.
There is also a global pre-roll and post-roll seconds. This is used by the encoders at record time. The encoders can get a head start ahead of the scheduled time of every show it is asked to record and this is none of the the scheduler's business. If two shows are back to back, the encoder goes from one to the next and quietly forgoes the extra time.
This is an obvious win, but harder to do on a single tuner. The Tivo does it terribly. Padding is manual and if you add it, the one minute overlap with another show counts as a conflict rather than a "no padding in this instance"
Multiple tuners can give you full padding on all shows, which is a useful feature, but reduces your ability to use multiple tuners to avoid conflicts if you also have abutting shows.
What you can do with Myth is to set some preroll seconds so that every show that isn't back to back will get this padding. If you strongly suspect that a certain title is likely to need more time and you don't want to risk missing, you can force the scheduled minutes for that show.
Many people seem to want multiple tuners so they can watch live TV while recording. They haven't realized the error of their ways in wanting to watch live TV. :-)
Careful. We know that A/V test mode (live TV) is just training wheels for people that haven't figured out what they have yet but there are some people out there who get really worked up about how they must channel surf and 'shouldn't have to record things'!?! ;-).
Ideally, when given a variable length event (sports, news, academy awards etc.) a PVR would always do tons of padding in available free disk space. As much as an hour. Then it would mark this extra hour as "delete this if you need space, starting at the end." Thus, if you watched reasonably soon after the event, you would not find it cut off.
Well if you are out of space there certainly must be better choices to expire than the potential overtime finish of today's game. Murphy says this would only happen when there is a thrilling triple overtime buzzer-beater. It's like anything else with disk space; if you're so tight that this one hour would make a difference then you don't need to find an extra 2% of the disk space, you need twice as much disk.
But, ya, with five tuners available I add 59 or 89 minutes to every sports event with a priority of -2. The things just go off and dominate a higher numbered tuner while my regularly scheduled shows fit in there normal slots. For the past two years I've recorded every College Basketball game (with overtime) the week before NCAA selections.
A really smart PVR would use shared knowledge from other viewers to figure out when the event actually ended (ie. almost everybody quit and deleted at 3 hours 22 minutes) and then retroactively queue that space for re-use. (But it should never delete until actually needed.) Or transcode the extra space really small.
I understand, but in the bigger picture the problem remains the
same. If a game is scheduled from 5:00 to 7:30 and there is a show
that you want to watch at 8:00 and the game goes past 8, you're
screwed.
Can you tell I have been frustrated to miss the end of a program?
More cards.
-- bjm _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
