Restricting a favorite to use a group of channels

[hchucky]

Is there a way to restrict a favorite to use a group of channels? I have a few situations where a show I'm trying to record is on 3-4 channels and only 2-3 of those channels contain the "actual" show that I am interested in. I don't want to restrict my favorite to just one channel because some programing moves around on a group of channels throughout the season.

HC

[MeInMaui]

One way around this might be to look at the list of future airings and mark all those shows you don't want to record as 'Watched'. They will then be skipped. This might be a bit tedious at first, but you should have to do it less as time goes on. Another approach is to set up a single channel favorite for each channel you want to record.

Aloha,
Mike

[hchucky]

Thanks Mike.

[Slugger]

I'm looking to address this same issue. This is going to come up for me when hockey season starts again (I'm relatively new to Sage). Didn't plan on addressing this until late in the summer, but since someone else is asking, I might as well start.

My issue is that my Edmonton Oilers games are listed on the regional sports channels and the NHL Centre Ice channels. Even though the game is listed as being shown on the regional channel, it's actually blacked out on that channel (since I don't live in the Edmonton region) and is only available on NHLCI package channels.

What I'm going to need is a favourite rule that says "Record Oilers games from any channel except the regional sports channel." I don't want to setup individual favourite rules for each NHLCI channel because that would require 12 or 13 separate rules all to record the same thing, which becomes a pain to manage. Also, simply marking the game as 'Watched' on the regional channel won't work because then it won't bother to record it from the NHLCI channel since it's been marked as 'Watched'.

I can write a runnable class that will scan the listings for me and set up manual recordings for the games automatically, but this seems like something that really should be addressed in the SageTV core scheduler.

Preferably, I'd like to be able to write SQL queries directly against the listings so I can be as specific as I want to be about what gets recorded, but I'd settle for this issue to be addressed in any way at all.

[MeInMaui]

I'm not sure, but flachbar's anti-favorites plug-in might help.

Aloha,
Mike

[GKusnick]

Seems to me that the real issue here is not in the recording scheduler or the favorites manager, but in the EPG data, which is feeding the scheduler bad information about what's actually on those channels. If a game is blacked out in your area, by rights the EPG ought to say Blacked Out or No Data for that timeslot. Then you wouldn't have a problem with recording from the wrong channel.

Whether it's possible to get such a fix into the Sage core or into the online EPG data source I have no idea. Filing a bug report about the bad data can't hurt. But if I were writing a plugin to address this issue, that's the angle I'd attack it from, by taking steps to clean up the downloaded EPG data to eliminate false or misleading entries so that the existing scheduling logic would have a chance of working properly. That's assuming of course that you have some independent way of knowing which games are blacked out.