On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 06:07:40PM -0800, Bruce Markey wrote:
Brad Templeton wrote: 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
That's good, but it actually overdoes it. One of my first bad Myth experiences -- once it was working -- involved it failing to record a show because the signal wasn't strong enough. It was convinced, even though it had failed, that it had recorded the show. It took quite a bit of work (and I lost several minutes of the show) trying to convince it to record it "again."
These things will improve with time.
I hope so. That's actually a different set of issues that have to do with the scheduler keeping track of what could, should or might be in progress or stopped or deleted. There are buttons to "Stop recording" then "Reactivate" to get out of these situations but there are cases now where something fails in a way that it doesn't know about it and Stop doesn't take effect so it can't be restarted.
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
I am sure the suggestion concept will see much advancement over time, including showing you shows that people with similar tastes to you are approving of etc.
Oh, I agree that there will be more stuff along these lines but my own personal opinion is that this is mostly Emperor's New Clothes. We're supposed to think it sounds like a good idea but there's almost nothing there. Suggestion's may be a good thing for Amazon where there are so many books, CDs and DVDs but for TV, Star Trek fans already know what other Sci-fi series are out there and Jerry Springer fans know about Rikki Lake. For events and specials, it would be too late by the time the viewership was totaled up.
There have been a couple stabs at 'finding out what myth users watch' but this seems misguided. There already is demographic info about what people watch from Nielsen ratings on down. If someone wants recommendations, go to zap2it's site and such rather than planting spyware just in MythTV.
With disk space cheap you might also just automatically record new shows and specials until the word gets out over whether they were good or bad.
In fact, this is similar to how I use the PVR.
See the section at the bottom called "Quick Review and the Nature of TV..." at: http://www.templetons.com/brad/tvfuture.html
The interesting concept of the suggestions was that, since the Tivo has an mpeg encoder, there is no reason for it to not always be recording something into spare disk space. Why not?
The cable is screwed on and the and the disks are spinning. Why shouldn't the red light be on?
It's a new lens onto the world of TV and worth exploring. As long as you have a clear concept of spare disk space, and your recording doesn't cost you CPU, you should go for it.
I failed to make the distinction between the suggestion list and auto-recording. But, ya, I thought having these record was a good idea for a few months. By then I never watched any of these anymore but left it on because this was the only way to see how much or little space wasn't taken by my own recordings. One thing I came to believe is that this was a good feature for DVR newbies because it sent a clear message that it's okay to record and delete things without watching them. The machine should be busy recording things for you to choose from and not just the things you feel obligated to watch.
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
Don't worry, you will get over it. :-)
Of course, this was a convenient scenario for a contrived example.
I mean I used to watch Survivor religiously. It was the only show I watched live (Starting at 8:15 and ending live. I never watch LIVE-live). But I broke from it this season and find I don't really miss it.
I also watched at ~8:10 or 8:20 which was a little revelation for me. One night I got a call from a friend from out of town and didn't start Survivor until ~9:30. That was a freeing experience and I never looked back. I'm no longer constrained in any way by TV broadcast schedules. I turn on the tube whenever I have time to watch one of my favorite shows and never believe that I need to be at the TV because of a scheduled broadcast time.
Another of many revelations was watching an episode of Junkyard Wars, as I did about four times a month, and realizing that I had no idea what time or night of the week they first aired new episodes. I also wasn't sure if I remembered the channel number for TLC.
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.
Right. This is what Tivo does and it's bad. You should almost never have to use it, because the auto padding should be long enough to handle almost all cases. The only time you should need to use manual padding is if you have two shows that abut, and they don't follow their time slots in some predictable way, and you don't have enough tuners and you know just what you want. That's pretty rare, but it does happen.
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.
That's the right approach -- but it should also start the playing cursor at the listed start time, and allow rewind if needed, so the user isn't even aware of it most of the time.
Well that sounds nifty but if the padding is there on the premise that the broadcast may have started early and it did, then the user is past the point where they'd like to be. Either way, the user needs to seek to find their starting point and I personally prefer going forward rather than rewinding over a part I shouldn't have seen yet.
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.
Though most users won't really get into that.
Um, speculative conclusion. You use it, I use it and it is discussed a lot on these lists. I suspect most people know about this feature, what it does, why they want it and which show they want it use it for. However, neither of us have an informed opinion about 'most users' ;-).
One imagines that a good
idea would be for users to form collective opinions on shows. For example, the last 5 minutes of 60 minutes are all commercials. The last 30 seconds of Survivor are an important part of the show (final words of contestant.) The first 30 seconds of some shows are always the theme music (less common today than it used to be.) Etc. etc.
Well now the premise of collective opinion is that most users are responding to end offset times =).
A database of this would be very handy so people would almost never have to manually pad. True PVR success means "it just works." You don't have to tweak it. Because my mother would not ever tweak it.
Padding suggestions may be good but if the shows are not abut then global pre/post-roll will be safe with no need identify the specific show. Where it would matter is when shows are back-to-back and the real problem remains of how to handle overlaps. If it was established that that Survivor is still showing the voters while they roll the credits after the top of the hour and there is no clear pattern that it is okay to start the user's 9:00 show late but it might be okay, then what do you do? Ultimately I think these kinds of decisions will always need human intervention.
-- bjm _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
