Feature Request: Explicit recording of Favorites should use Favorite settings

[tbpub2]

I have favorites for Seinfeld, Friends, King of the Hill, and The Simpsons. They all come on at 7:00 and 7:30 and I have two tuners, so each day I get conflicts. What I do is eyeball what episode is playing each day and do an explicit record of the two I want that day.

The favorite settings for the 2 cartoons are lower quality than for the live video, which uses the default settings. When I explicitly record the cartoons, they use the default settings, not the settings for the favorites.

If I manually record a favorite, it should use the quality settings for that favorite.

I will also file a bug.

[tbpub2]

I can work around this by having the cartoons be higher priority with the conflicting live action shows. That way, an explicit record of a live show will use the default (higher) quality, whereas no action will use the favorite (lower) quality for the cartoon.

The problem however is the Yellow Exclamation mark never goes away. If you have four favorites with two tuners, the third priority shows up with a Yellow Warning icon. If you choose "no action", the Yellow Icon goes away. If you then go and explicitly record the two higher priority items, then do into the Conflict screen, and choose "no action", the Yellow Conflict icon goes away and the 3rd item only shows up as a normal "won't record."

I guess what I'm going to have to do is put the two live shows as higher priority than the cartoons, then use the single-instance Favorite override. Which is unfortunate, because I really want the cartoons to have higher priority.

I hope this makes some kind of sense.

[falchulk]

Why not just make the seinfeld favorite channel specific to a channel that does not conflict with the time slot of the cartoons? Seinfeld is on like 5 channels throughout the day and its likely that you could resolve your issue this way.

[tbpub2]

No, the point is I don't want to always do one thing or the other. I've seen all the Seinfeld and Friends reruns dozens of times, so all things being equal I'd prefer to get KOTH and/or Simpsons during that time slot as its less likely to be something I've seen.

However it might be that one of *those* is something I've seen before, or a baseball game has preempted something, or whatever. Or it might be something I really want to record even if I've seen it before. There is no "always" rule. I just have to look at what's playing each day and make a case by case decision.

There's no getting around it, because even Conflict Resolution is done by doing an explicit record of a favorite. If an expicit record is done of a favorite who uses non-default record settings, then the custom settings will not be used for the explicit record, the default settings will be used. They should be at least copied to the new explicit record.

[falchulk]

From your response, I dont know if you understood my suggestion. If there are other channels that run sienfeld during the day, at diffrent timeslots then the toons, you can set a favorite on that channel only instead of recording from all channels that run it. This would allow you to record the toons while still picking up the other shows.

[tbpub2]

That's not what I want. (And in fact your assumption about the distribution of shows via channel is incorrect).

I do not "always want (a) and only want (b) when it doesn't conflict." Sometimes I want one and sometimes I want the other, depending what's coming on.

[falchulk]

Since the same shows are show in syndication on all channels over a period of time, you would get all the shows without having to make a decision at all. The way I suggested, you would be removed from the equation. Thats what I thought you wanted from your first post. This is what I would do and it will accomplish what you want. If you would rather keep doing it the way you are, why did you post this? Also please explain why my "assumption" is incorrect?

[Opus4]

I can see what you mean about wanting manually recorded favorites to use the favorite's padding & quality settings -- would be useful & I had never checked to see what would happened when you do this.

Regarding the conflict notice: _if_ the reason you don't want an episode is because you've seen it, you could mark it as watched so it doesn't get considered. (Yes, I know you may not have watched it; in that case this suggestion wouldn't work.)

- Andy

[falchulk]

To me this issue is just a software learning problem. You have to learn to eliminate reoccurning conflicts. This means changing the way you record things. Hence my suggestion. This is easily done once you realize that the popular syndicated shows are spread over many channels. Who wants 5 episodes a day of any show? Why not record it 2 times a day on one channel and get other shows that had conflicts?

[tbpub2]

Ah, the procrustes bed solution: if you're too tall, we'll lop your legs off, if you're too short, we'll stretch you on the rack, but your problem can be made to fit what our technology is currently capable of doing by simply pretending that's what you wanted to do in the first place.

It's not a big deal, but I prefer to work hard and make my technology do what I want, not morph what I want into what it's capable of doing. These shows might seem like they repeat forever, but they are actually only shown a limited number of times (per syndication contract).

[falchulk]

.

[falchulk]

tbpub2, I am from the Macgyver school of thought. You take what you got and make it do what you want. Unless you write the software yourself, you have to make tradeoffs. In any software application, there is going to be a time when development is static. The feature set is the feature set. You are going to want it to do things it cant do. If you can make it do what you want, even if its not HOW you want, by using features built into the app now.............Why complain?

[tbpub2]

All of this is incidental: all I am asking is that if you do an explicit record of a favorite with non-default record settings, those non-default record settings should be automatically copied to the explicit recording instead of using the Default settings again. If I have taken the effort to set padding and quality settings for a favorite, I probably want those used if for whatever reason I also explicitly record an instance of that favorite. I most likely do not want the default settings.

You're suggesting ignoring the problem when a solution is clearly at hand and is clearly the Right Thing to do.

[mlbdude]

The behavior you are asking for exists in 1.4. By user suggestion it is not in 2.x. Unfortunately you can't please everybody.

[tbpub2]

What is the upside to *not* copying the custom padding/quality settings to the explicit recording? I can understand why I *may* want to use different padding/qualities for a single instance, but I should think that typically I would want them the same.

It's a misfeature. It should at least be a sage.properties option to control this behavior.