No Custom Title Support for Timed Recordings

[bohan]

I am on latest stable 7.0.23.

I am in Australia and we commonly use C-band DVB-S on Asiasat 5 100E, Aisasat 3S 105E and Chinasat 6B 115E to get foreign news, European and Chinese programming.

There is no EPG available for these lineups.

As a result, we depend on Timed Recordings.

Now, back in the days when we used MythTV (i.e. a few days ago) and a Strong SRT4990 PVR (a week ago), we were able to assign titles to each manual timed recording schedule, such that you can actually identity what has been recorded.

It seems this feature is not available in SageTV

I read in another thread that one can change the guide data manually in the Web UI to achieve this. However, as or April 2010, Neim's Web UI has switched to targeting 7.1.2+. I am not in a position to switch to a Beta server, as I do not have the required time to debug issues due to work.

Is there any solution out of this problem?

I assume it would be extremely easy for the developers to add such a feature, It would be even better for the titles to be reflected back in the guide itself, so that you kind of create a virtual TV guide.

By the way, I have tried assigning a User Category with the same name as my desired title. However, it only assigns it to the next "airing", and not to all the recordings that are part of this schedule (i.e. one wants a recording that is MonTueWed each week, and one would hope that assigning the category to one of the items in the schedule will modify all of them, but it does not).

[tmiranda]

Are you creating the timed recording from TV -> Schedule Recordings -> Create Timed Recording or by clicking on the "No Data" entry in the guide?

[tmiranda]

bohan,

I've actually got a plugin that does exactly what you want. Let me know if you want to try it out. What is does is an an extra step on the timed recording screen (after setting the times) that lets you pick a name. After that the name will appear in the UI instead of "Timed Record".

I never released the plugin because I wasn't sure if anybody would use it or not.

Tom

[tmiranda]

What the heck, I packaged up the plugin and submitted it. Post questions and support requests here.

Tom

PS. Tech weenies may be interested in the nifty recursive algorithm it uses to get all of the properties defined in the Sage.properties file.

[bohan]

What is the name of the plugin?
I cannot wait to try it!!!!

[bohan]

I installed the plugin and tried to set a timed recording, but it does not seem to work.
I went to create a new timed recording, but after setting the channel, start time, end time, title (Yes!!!) and days of the week, it says: "Internal error. Airings=0"

Any ideas? I really want this to work, its one of the final pieces of the jigsaw puzzle!!!

[bohan]

The second time I tried, it said:

"Internal error, did not find the timed recording"

[tmiranda]

I know what causes that error. Let me look into it a little and I'll post back here.

Edit: What is the default name of the timed recordings? The plugin expects it to be "Timed Record". Maybe the string is being localized to something different down under.

[bohan]

On mine the default is "Timed Record"

[bohan]

By the way, do you know if there is a way to change a timed recording, like change the start time?

I am going to start some plugin development soon, I have a lot of Java and .NET/C# experience. How much code was involved to get your plugin running? Is there any additional licenses to buy?

[tmiranda]

Then I'm not sure why it's not working. I'll investigate later today.

To develop plugins there are no licenses to buy. As long as you have a licensed version of SageTV or SageClient you just press Ctrl-Shift-F12 from the sage interface and that starts Studio. I'd highly recommend using a SageClient so if you mess something up it will not crash your server. SageClient is $30 so maybe you can consider that a license that you need to buy.

You can use whatever you like for Java developemnt. Most people here use eclipse, I use NetBeans. (I've only been coding in Java for a little over a year so I'm a newbie. Others here have a lot more experience than I do.)

This plugin is not very complicated, but it takes a lot of knowledge about how Sage functions. There is some Studio code to allow the user input of the name and then to "register" that name with SageTV. There is also a support JAR that is used to create a new method to replace the normal method the STV uses to get the title. Source is here: http://code.google.com/p/tmiranda/so...TimedRecording

It's not very well documented but you should get the idea on how it works. (Edit. I just looked at the code and it is documented.)

I actually need to change this a little to make sure the name is permanent. Right now there is a chance that the name will be lost. (I'll fill you in on the details if you are interested.)

If you are an experienced programmer you'll pick up things quickly. The steepest part of your learning curve will be learning the quirks of Studio and learning the Sage specific items. There are many helpful people here so if you have questions post them in the Studio section of the forum.

Tom

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by bohan

The second time I tried, it said:

"Internal error, did not find the timed recording"

Can you provide me a log file to look at? You need to do the following:

- Go to Setup -> Detailed Setup -> Advanced. At the bottom of the list you will see Debug Logging. Change it to "On" (or "On/On" if you're on a SageClient).

- Restart SageTV (or the SageClient).

- Reproduce the error.

- In the sage install directory (C:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV) you will find sagetv_0.txt (or sagetvclient_0.txt). Zip that file and attach it to a post.

Thanks,

Tom

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by bohan

By the way, do you know if there is a way to change a timed recording, like change the start time??

I forgot to answer this one. Go to the recording schedule and click on the timed recording. You will get an options dialog where one of the options is "Record Options. Click on that and one of the choices is to adjust the recording options. Then you can change the time.

Edit: And just for fun I added an option to this menu to change the name.

[bohan]

I always run with Debug enabled (does this actually results in noticable performance loss? I haven't notice and speed issues)

The log is attached.

Please note, that the recording still gets created, just that the name does not get set.

Do you think there is a cleaner way for us to do this, as in:

1. mod the guide data with our manual program data
2. set it the program as a favorite, with restricted channel and time.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by bohan

I always run with Debug enabled (does this actually results in noticable performance loss? I haven't notice and speed issues)

The log is attached.

Please note, that the recording still gets created, just that the name does not get set.

Do you think there is a cleaner way for us to do this, as in:

1. mod the guide data with our manual program data
2. set it the program as a favorite, with restricted channel and time.

There are many ways to do this. Maybe it's a good candidate for your first project? I would probably lean towards editing the MediaFile "Title" metadata so the normal GetAiringTitle() method will return the name that is set, rather than having to replace the method with a new one. I didn't go that route because I am unsure if that will play nice with things like BMT.

I looked at the log and I suspect I know what's happening, but I can't be certain. I have a test version for you to try, to install:

Download the attached .xml file.
Unzip into the sage install directory on your server.
Go to the plugin manager "UI Mod" section and you should see an "update available" message for the plugin.
Update the plugin.

If it does not work please attach another log.

Thanks,

Tom

[bohan]

Thats just the thing, on mine, after clicking record options, there is only 1 option, to cancel the recording, there are no options to change time.

[bohan]

It would not let me update the plugin to 1.10 due to a MD5 checksum mismatch on the download zip file from googlecode

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by bohan

It would not let me update the plugin to 1.10 due to a MD5 checksum mismatch on the download zip file from googlecode

Sorry, wrong xml file. Try this one.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by bohan

Thats just the thing, on mine, after clicking record options, there is only 1 option, to cancel the recording, there are no options to change time.

I just looked at the code in the STV. It will only display the option of the recurrence is set to Once.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by bohan

Thats just the thing, on mine, after clicking record options, there is only 1 option, to cancel the recording, there are no options to change time.

I can now reproduce the error, this was the clue. I always schedule the timed recordings Once, when I set the schedule for Weekly I can reproduce your problem.

Tom