[Steve]

Thanks to bleeping ABC, I've been wrestling with our TODO list every since two of my wife's favorite shows started the new season... Dancing with the Stars and Private Practice. Both shows have :01 stop times and depending on PRIORITY, either one will bump a show in the next hour on a different channel, or be bumped themselves if I lower its priority. As a result, I've set them as "recurring manuals", ending at :00, but as you know, if ABC decides to air them at a different time, the "manual" SL has no way of knowing this.

We have a request for "negative padding" on the Wish List, which, if implemented would allow me to configure Dancing or Practice SL to end a minute early, or to set one of the subsequent shows to start a minute late. Still a lot of work, tho, IMHO, because it involves frequent checking of the TODO list to make sure everything is "OK", and I'm trying to find ways to check it less often.

What if we had a new SL option to "Auto adjust a scheduled show's start/stop time, if necessary to avoid conflicts"? We'd be giving the HR permission on a SL by SL basis to automatically trim a show that runs a minute or two late or starts a minute or two early (like last year's Idol "results" shows), but only if the scheduler determined that the extra time will cause a conflict. Of course, if the extra minute or two is important to you, you would not enable this feature. It would be completely optional, and hopefully our separate "negative padding" request might allow us to one day trim a following or preceding show instead.

Thanks in advance for your comments, suggestions and votes. /steve

EDIT: TiVo's optional "overlap protection" will clip as much as 5 minutes of a show to prevent it from being bumped. Speaking for myself, I might be willing to clip an entertainment or talk show by 5 minutes, but a mystery or sci-fi thriller by only 1 or 2 minutes. So I think if we put this request on the Wish List, we should ask that it be user-configurable from 0-5 minutes per SL.

 

[Mike Bertelson]

I'm with you.

I voted yes.

Mike

 

[AirRocker]

Sounds good to me!

 

[Syzygy]

Great idea! I've had to use manual recordings several times to work around this problem.

 

[Steve]

Thanks for the bumps, guys! Based on early results, I think this one may be on it's way to the Wish List. /steve

 

[RandCfilm]

Hmm, I'm thinking on this one.

TiVo has Overlap Protection -
Overlap Protection™: In the past, if two of your favorite shows overlapped by a minute or two, you could only record one or the other. Now, with Overlap Protection™, your TiVo® box can record both shows back-to-back by clipping just enough from the end of the first show or the beginning of the second show, based on which has the higher Season Pass priority in Season Pass Manager.

Probably patented by TiVo so this probably could not be used.

 

[RandCfilm]

Well, I'm not sure what I was thinking :nono2: but this is the same as what the TiVo does so it will get my "yes" vote

And I may get the award for "stupid post of the day" today

 

[Doug Brott]

Hmm, I'm thinking on this one.

TiVo has Overlap Protection -
Overlap Protection™: In the past, if two of your favorite shows overlapped by a minute or two, you could only record one or the other. Now, with Overlap Protection™, your TiVo® box can record both shows back-to-back by clipping just enough from the end of the first show or the beginning of the second show, based on which has the higher Season Pass priority in Season Pass Manager.

Probably patented by TiVo so this probably could not be used.

Actually DIRECTV has already utilized some of TiVo's Patents and there was a new agreement recently announced which extends DIRECTV's access to TiVo's Patents through 2015 with an option for 3 additional years past that.

 

[inkahauts]

I like the idea, only I think the trim should only happen to the beginning of shows, and not base it on priority unless there are two shows starting, and one will be trimmed, and the other won't. Then you trim the lower priority. I would always want my risk to be the beginning of a show, never the end because its more likely you'll miss important things at the end than the beginning...

 

[ub1934]

We need the HRs to know when a show is starting late , like Sunday when the football game always runs long and Cold Case starts on time but gets cut off form 15 to 30 min or more from the end because of the long game .

 

[Steve]

I like the idea, only I think the trim should only happen to the beginning of shows, and not base it on priority unless there are two shows starting, and one will be trimmed, and the other won't. Then you trim the lower priority. I would always want my risk to be the beginning of a show, never the end because its more likely you'll miss important things at the end than the beginning...

My thought is that you can decide which show is trimmed based on your knowledge of whether the show will run late (Dancing) or start early (Idol results). Hopefully our current request for "negative padding" will be implemented as well, so in an ideal world, you'll either have the option "autotrim" Dancing (courtesy of this new request) or start one of the bumped shows a minute later (courtesy of our existing "negative padding" request).

Sure, you can negatively pad in either case, but autotrim takes some of the babysitting of the TODO list away for shows you know can handle it.

Wishful thinking, huh? :lol: But certainly not beyond the potential capabilities of the box, IMO. /steve

 

[Steve]

We need the HRs to know when a show is starting late , like Sunday when the football game always runs long and Cold Case starts on time but gets cut off form 15 to 30 min or more from the end because of the long game .

One of our favorite shows too, so I manually pad our Cold Case Series Link for an hour, up until the pre-Super Bowl off week. There's just something about that Lily... /steve

 

[Steve]

Actually DIRECTV has already utilized some of TiVo's Patents and there was a new agreement recently announced which extends DIRECTV's access to TiVo's Patents through 2015 with an option for 3 additional years past that.

Ya. Between the TiVo patents and the Replay patents that DirecTV now owns, there's pretty much nothing that can't be done on an HR2x, if the hardware supported it and DirecTV wanted to implement it. /steve

 

[ATARI]

If only they had the technology to constantly record on both tuners and then be able to switch between the two with a punch of a button.

That would be cool !

 

[houskamp]

Had to go with " not a problem I have".. I have so many recordings on monday and friday that it wouldn't help me.. Extra DVRs was my only solution to this problem..


Bring on MRV so I can watch them all in one room

 

[Steve]

The recently introduced TiVo automatic "overlap protection" will clip a show up to 5 minutes before it decides to bump it and look for another recording. That seems a little much for me for general use, but that's just my .02.

I think with this request, we should ask that any HR2x "auto start/stop adjustments" be configurable on a show by show basis, from 0-5 minutes. E.g., you might be willing to clip an entertainment or talk show by 5 minutes, but only 1-2 minutes for a mystery or sci-fi thriller, where it's important to follow the plot closely.

I'll add it to post #1 for now, but I can edit it based on your feedback. TIA for your comments. /steve

 

[houskamp]

The recently introduced TiVo automatic "overlap protection" will clip a show up to 5 minutes before it decides to bump it and look for another recording. That seems a little much for me for general use, but that's just my .02.

I think with this request, we should ask that any HR2x "auto start/stop adjustments" be configurable on a show by show basis, from 0-5 minutes. E.g., you might be willing to clip an entertainment or talk show by 5 minutes, but only 1-2 minutes for a mystery or sci-fi thriller, where it's important to follow the plot closely.

I'll add it to post #1 for now, but I can edit it based on your feedback. TIA for your comments. /steve

Yep, I get ticked if my shows are clipped at all..

 

[sacalait]

Had I voted yesterday, I would have voted differently, but it happened to me last night. Bones ran from 8-9:01 so it did not record because of 2 scheduled recordings at 9PM. Unfortunately, I didn't realize it until 8:45.

So I voted yes.

Guess I'll watch it on Hulu.

 

[RandCfilm]

I think with this request, we should ask that any HR2x "auto start/stop adjustments" be configurable on a show by show basis, from 0-5 minutes. E.g., you might be willing to clip an entertainment or talk show by 5 minutes, but only 1-2 minutes for a mystery or sci-fi thriller, where it's important to follow the plot closely.

I'll add it to post #1 for now, but I can edit it based on your feedback. TIA for your comments. /steve

The more control I have over my unit the better. I like your ideas, but if DirecTV is not going to implement inkahauts soft pad idea, which would be so simple, this would take even more programming to accomplish.
The more complicated it is to program into the software, the end result is much better. Just like the wife wanting me to something, I will come up with several different ways of doing it. I ask her which way, she says "do which is the easiest", and I always to the hardest idea, but the end result is always a much better finished project.

Ideally we should have:
1) Recording defaults with soft pad as global option
2) Each SL then should have:
--- a) user configurable soft pad setting
--- b) user configurable auto trim option (how much your willing to trim start/end to avoid conflicts)
--- c) hard pad (which we already have)
--- d) -- other options we would like to have.

Hard core users would love this, I know I would, having control over each show would be great. If the programmers are reading these posts they are probably saying, do they know how complicated that would be, so much work, are they crazy? If it can be done on paper, it can be programmed into software. But how great would the end product be?

 

[Steve]

The more control I have over my unit the better. I like your ideas, but if DirecTV is not going to implement inkahauts soft pad idea, which would be so simple, this would take even more programming to accomplish.
The more complicated it is to program into the software, the end result is much better. Just like the wife wanting me to something, I will come up with several different ways of doing it. I ask her which way, she says "do which is the easiest", and I always to the hardest idea, but the end result is always a much better finished project.

Ideally we should have:
1) Recording defaults with soft pad as global option
2) Each SL then should have:
--- a) user configurable soft pad setting
--- b) user configurable auto trim option (how much your willing to trim start/end to avoid conflicts)
--- c) hard pad (which we already have)
--- d) -- other options we would like to have.

Hard core users would love this, I know I would, having control over each show would be great. If the programmers are reading these posts they are probably saying, do they know how complicated that would be, so much work, are they crazy? If it can be done on paper, it can be programmed into software. But how great would the end product be?

I hear you about the complexity, but like in the case of our original AUTOPAD Wish List request ("one minute on each end if it won't cause a conflict"), I just don't want the engineers to say we never asked for configurability.

When I proposed the original AUTOPAD request way back when, in my mind, I thought 30 seconds at each end would be enough to overcome minor discrepancies between the network clocks and the HR's clocks, but I didn't think you could pad in less than one minute increments. I also never dreamt they wouldn't make such a feature "optional", so it never occurred to me to specify that either. My bad.

As a result, I'd rather lay out our "ideal" request, and let the engineers decide how much of it they want to implement. I know if I was a TiVo user, I'd be unhappy with either 5 minutes of clipping or none at all. Tho, at least TiVo gives the users the option to disable it. /steve