Buffer Max Length and Duration?

[ktuimala]

I am just starting the journey of abandoning my horrible cable DVR and replacing it with SageTV. So far i am satisfied, however, there are couple things bugging me in relation to buffering live TV and I am wondering if anything can be done.

First off, it seems that live TV can only be buffered for so long. Tonight I paused a program I was watching and left for about an hour. I came back and resumed my program and watched the next. Unfortunately part way through the next program it stopped and brought me to my recording list. Sadly I didn't get to finish my program and had to navigate back to live TV. To my dismay it seems that there is a limit of 2 hours for buffering TV. My old cable DVR could pause TV for several hours and would allow me to watch it right on through to live TV assuming I had enough hard drive space. This drive has nearly 400 GB free. So, is there a way to increase the max buffer size for live TV so that I can happily watch all my buffered shows for a given channel?

Second. Often my wife and I will leave a channel running and come back and rewind it a half hour or so to catch something we didn't want to bother recording. It seems that once a program is done, SageTV deletes the buffer and starts a new one. This regrettably dumps the previous program block so I can no longer rewind to see the program I wanted catch on the same station. For example, missing the sports section of the 6 o'clock news and trying to rewind at 6:33 PM only to find that your buffer quits at 6:30 PM.... Sad.....

I know that I could record what I want to see, and I do, but this kind of flexibility is what I have come to enjoy with my old cable DVR. Unfortunately it was the only feature that was worth it with my old DVR. SageTV runs circles around my old DVR, but it sucks that these two features don't seem to be available.

Any help would be great!!

[Opus4]

SageTV doesn't use a live TV buffer; it records each show to its own file.

As a new user, you should check out the PDF manual that is installed with SageTV -- specifically, chapter 2's "SageTV Quick Start Guide" (p. 19 for v6.6) and Appendix C: Managing Recording Files (p. 257). Appendix C includes a section titled "Automatic Cleanup of Live TV", which explains when live TV get deleted and how you could keep those files instead.

- Andy

[ktuimala]

Thanks! It takes a bit of getting used to, but it works rather well. Almost preferable.