Watch TV and NOT Record

[jkb242]

There are many times I want to simply view a program or look at a few shows at a time without recording everything I look at.

Where is the option in Sage TV to turn off the default recoding. Whether you selec record this show or not, while watching it, it is being recorded to the default destination drive for recroding.

Please assist.

Thanks!!

[Opus4]

As this FAQ says, there is no such option. SageTV always records, even for 'live' TV.

- Andy

[jkb242]

Wonderful then why do they call it PVR software as a REAL PVR only records if set to do so.

What is was the thinking behind this? Is it not concievable that one may want to view and NOT record?

What happens when I want to watch a two hour show? I would have to purchase more drive space to simply watch TV. Does that really make sense?

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by jkb242

Wonderful then why do they call it PVR software as a REAL PVR only records if set to do so.

Pretty much all the PVRs I'm aware of record continuously, that's the way they support timeshifting.

What happens when I want to watch a two hour show? I would have to purchase more drive space to simply watch TV. Does that really make sense?

Sage automatcially deletes the temporary recordings used for "live" TV when it needs space. If you don't have enough space for a 2 hour show, how are you going to record anything?

[Spartan]

Why don't you just split the cable / antenna wire and run it directory to your TV? Works for me.

[ChubbyTiger]

Originally Posted by jkb242

Wonderful then why do they call it PVR software as a REAL PVR only records if set to do so.

What is was the thinking behind this? Is it not concievable that one may want to view and NOT record?

What happens when I want to watch a two hour show? I would have to purchase more drive space to simply watch TV. Does that really make sense?

It wouldn't make sense to not record. In order to time-shift (pause, rewind, etc) you need to save it to the HDD. If you really are that short of space, try http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148262. $70 will get you another 250 GB of quality HDD. I've got a 320 and I don't think I've ever filled it - in 3 years.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by jkb242

What is was the thinking behind this?

Because Sage supports multiple clients, it's possible for different clients to get to the same show through different menus. One client might choose a show from the Program Guide while another chooses the same show from the Recordings menu. In order to make this work seamlessly for all clients, all shows are treated identically, as recordings, regardless of how you got there.

Temporary recordings made by watching Live TV will be automatically deleted when space is needed.

And as Spartan says, if you really don't want it to record, you can always watch TV the old-fashioned way.

[Serra]

Originally Posted by jkb242

What happens when I want to watch a two hour show? I would have to purchase more drive space to simply watch TV. Does that really make sense?

It does make sense, if you think about the technology. The whole idea of being able to pause and rewind doesn't work if it isn't first recorded in the first place.

Yes, it would seem like a smart idea to be able to just watch TV, but you would be giving up the whole PVR idea if you did that. I guess if you don't want to watch TV via a PVR, don't....

[Slipshod]

I think the part that the long-time Sage users are not getting is that we shouldn't have to have tons of fragments of partially watched shows cluttering up the lists. If I'm watching live TV and haven't clicked record, and the show itsn't scheduled to record, and none of the other clients it currently watching it, the show shouldn't be kept when I switch to another channel. It's not that hard to figure out.

I think the strangest thing to me is that it looks like you can do this in Sage, but you have to turn off the automatic suggestion recording to make it work. I'd like both...

[Opus4]

First, partial recordings from channel surfing don't clutter up the list of recordings, because they aren't complete recordings. They exist on the hard drive, but not in SageTV. Only complete recordings will be listed, unless an incomplete recording is a Manual Recording.

Second, SageTV is designed to manage the space you allot for it to use, so it will delete older & lower priority shows as needed when space is needed for new recordings, with live TV snippets having nearly the lowest priority. This is covered in Appendix C of the PDF manual. If you are letting SageTV manage its recording disk space, you most likely won't end up with many live TV snippets laying around because almost all the space SageTV is allowed to use will be put to use, but...

If you wish to manually take charge of the partial recordings laying around, then that can be covered in the UI too. The hidden extras has a screen that lists all partial recordings. You can delete them all by selecting any one of them, then choosing the option to "Delete <N> Partials".

If you are worried about all these recording taking up hard drive space that you need for something else, then you are allotting too much recording space to SageTV. When you create the Video Recording Directories, you should configure each recording directory with the amount of space SageTV can use on that drive. You can tell it to Use Only X GB, Leave X GB Free, or Use All available space. Tell SageTV to use as much space on a drive as you want it to use.

TV recordings take up a lot of space. You won't get much use out of a PVR with an old 20GB drive, for example, so if you expect to get the most benefit from a program like SageTV, you really ought to consider getting a very large hard drive -- they are fairly cheap. Let SageTV use most or all of it.

If you don't want to record anything & simply want to use a tuner to watch live TV on your PC, then a PVR serves no purpose since, often, other programs from the tuner mfr display the live preview from the card w/o saving a file. This isn't a PVR, this is simply TV on a PC.

What many newcomers don't get is that in the long run, most people who start using a PVR discover that watching Live TV is an old concept -- instead, PVR users create Favorites to automatically record their shows when they are on, then watch them when they have time. To me, live TV is flipping channels on my TV while SageTV is paused when someone has to leave the room for a few minutes.

- Andy

[Addict]

Dude, just hop on board. You won't be disappointed. This is, by far, the most complete and stable PVR system available. I've tried just about all of 'em.

I questioned a lot of things when I got here, and I shake my head at my old self now-a-days. They've been doing this for a long time, and they're good at it. Everything's done for a reason (as many have explained).

Anyway, seriously, just get in. The water's nice.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by Slipshod

I think the strangest thing to me is that it looks like you can do this in Sage, but you have to turn off the automatic suggestion recording to make it work. I'd like both...

So what you're saying is that you want Intelligent Recording to record programs it thinks you might like to watch, but not the programs you actually do watch in Live TV mode. Have I got that right?

I guess I don't see what the big deal is. If you're using IR, then your recording disk will basically be full all the time anyway, and Sage will automatically delete programs as needed to make room. The programs you watch live will be among the first deleted by this logic. So why does it matter how long Sage keeps them after you change the channel?

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

So what you're saying is that you want Intelligent Recording to record programs it thinks you might like to watch, but not the programs you actually do watch in Live TV mode. Have I got that right?

I guess I don't see what the big deal is. If you're using IR, then your recording disk will basically be full all the time anyway, and Sage will automatically delete programs as needed to make room. The programs you watch live will be among the first deleted by this logic. So why does it matter how long Sage keeps them after you change the channel?

I can see what he might be saying. He's basically saying that he may leave the weather channel on in the background to hear the latest updates on an approaching storm but doesn't necessarily want Sage's IR to constantly record the weather channel on its own.
Or maybe leaving one of the digital music channels on for background "noise" while you do the dishes, etc?

I'm a long time IR user and my disk is nowhere near full. I never watch live TV in Sage, I simply use the TV's tuner, or the cable box to watch live tv.
I wish there were, but there's simply NO WAY to use IR if you watch any live TV in Sage. If there was an option in Sage to have IR ignore live tv recordings, then you could still watch live on occasions like I listed above.

What many new PVR users don't seem to understand initially is that just about any PVR (TiVo, Sage, etc) are recording any time you are watching live Tv. Most PVR's don't have a direct link from their tuners to the screen. They must write the data to the drive and then the software/hardware of the PVR read the data from the drive and send it to the TV.

[GKusnick]

There may be legitimate complaints about the intelligence of IR with respect to the like/don't like status of live TV, but that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about the fact that live TV files don't get deleted instantly when you change channels if IR is enabled. The complaint is about clutter, not about biasing IR's choices.

My point is that if you use IR, you have a lot of clutter anyway, so why not keep around those programs that IR knows for sure you wanted to watch? Where's the harm in that? You can always set the filters to exclude Watched programs from the recordings list.

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

There may be legitimate complaints about the intelligence of IR with respect to the like/don't like status of live TV, but that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about the fact that live TV files don't get deleted instantly when you change channels if IR is enabled. The complaint is about clutter, not about biasing IR's choices.

My point is that if you use IR, you have a lot of clutter anyway, so why not keep around those programs that IR knows for sure you wanted to watch? Where's the harm in that? You can always set the filters to exclude Watched programs from the recordings list.

I can see your point about clutter if you watch live tv, but there's really no excuse for clutter just because you use IR. Once you make sure you've got aggressive negative profiling turned on and spend just a short period of time training IR it works great and you end up with very little "clutter".
If you're using IR AND watch live tv, you've got to get in the habit of marking anything you don't want IR to record as DON'T LIKE and also make sure you toggle the watched status to show the program as unwatched.

I would like Sage to address those problems with IR so that people can watch live Tv and not make it difficult to get IR working well. However I so rarely watch live tv it's not an issue on my system. Anytime I do want to watch live tv I just use the built in tuner on the tv, the tuner on the vcr, or the cable box, none of which are connected to Sage as a recording device.

These are old habits and connection methods I implemented LONG ago when I had 5 vcr's hooked up to record my shows. I kept the same system when I replaced 4 of the vcr's with ReplayTV's.

So there are ways around it, but I recognize that the methods aren't ideal and could seriously hamper the WAF factor.

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by Opus4

First, partial recordings from channel surfing don't clutter up the list of recordings, because they aren't complete recordings. They exist on the hard drive, but not in SageTV. Only complete recordings will be listed, unless an incomplete recording is a Manual Recording.

Since I don't have it setup yet (gear arriving monday) I didn't realize that Sage doesn't display the "partial recordings" in SageTV. Everything I've read so far (manual p235 and forums) didn't mention that partial recordings are only on the hard disk (not in the UI), so I assumed that they are displayed in Sage just like every other recording. I don't care about clutter on the hard disk, I care about clutter in the UI. I thought I was going to have tons of partially recorded shows listed in Sage when I browsed my recorded shows. If that's not the case then I don't have an issue, though it does sound like I could have some interesting experiences with IR in store for me. And it still seems silly to keep the "whole" shows around from liveTV if I didn't explicitly tell the PVR to record it.

Try to be a bit more specific when explaining it - the manual and the descriptions on the forums I've read make it seem ugly when it's not.


Cheers,
SLipshod

P.S. I've been using DVRs in one form or another for the last 8 years and am well acquainted with the constant recording to disk and watching less live TV due to recorded favorites. I still surf live TV on occasion waiting for something to buffer enough to skip commercials, or to look at a show to see if I like it, or just because there's nothing recorded that I want to watch. And I refuse to watch any TV if I can't pause/rewind/skip, so going straight to the TV is not an option.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by Slipshod

And it still seems silly to keep the "whole" shows around from liveTV if I didn't explicitly tell the PVR to record it.

By enabling IR, you've given Sage permission to record (and keep) shows that you didn't explicitly mark for recording. Given that you watched it once, it's conceivable you might want to watch it again, so it makes sense for Sage to err on the side of caution when deciding how long to keep watched shows. As noted previously, you can always set the UI to filter out watched shows if you don't want to see them in the list.

[troycheek]

Though everybody speaks as if this is universal, the programs I tried prior to Sage, admittedly mostly the crap software bundled with various cheap TV cards, had distinct live and timeshift modes. WinDVR2 comes to mind. You watched TV live and, if you needed to answer the phone or go to the bathroom, hit pause and began timeshift mode. During replay, once you caught up, you switched back to live. It never occurred to me that there was another way to do it.

There was also a noticeable difference in picture quality and audio sync between live and recorded/shifted, so that might have something to do with it as well.

Of course, now that I've seen Sage in action, combined with the hardware MPEG-2 encoding of my recently purchased Plextor ConvertX PX-TV402U (only $50 after $80 rebate, though the rebate when to purchase SageTV), I see the error of my ways.

[bline22]

I have sage tv running on whs and have client machines that utilize the tv service.
When family members watch there shows whether they are flipping through channels or watching the entirety of the program these all get recorded to my TV Recordings folder.
My question is, i only wanted stuff that i have assigned to record to actually record. How do i do this?

There are around 200 files in this folder just from the past week. Some being 10mb and some around 500mb. They take up a lot of valuable space and don't go away unless i clean them up. I understand that sagetv does time shifting while watching tv, but when i leave the channel it would seem the program should delete that file? Maybe i missed something during the setup?

Thanks for the help.

* merged *

[Fastrack]

Originally Posted by bline22

I have sage tv running on whs and have client machines that utilize the tv service.
When family members watch there shows whether they are flipping through channels or watching the entirety of the program these all get recorded to my TV Recordings folder.
My question is, i only wanted stuff that i have assigned to record to actually record. How do i do this?

There are around 200 files in this folder just from the past week. Some being 10mb and some around 500mb. They take up a lot of valuable space and don't go away unless i clean them up. I understand that sagetv does time shifting while watching tv, but when i leave the channel it would seem the program should delete that file? Maybe i missed something during the setup?

Thanks for the help.

Please see this topic <merged; see above>


Basically SageTV records everything but will purge the "LiveTV" when space is required.