Feature Request: Improved Recording Intelligence

[RAlfieri]

I know that I am not the only one who is beginning to tear his hair out over the scheduling games the networks are playing. A couple of weeks ago, ABC cleverly had Grey's Anatomy run over 5 minutes which would have knocked out my recording of ER had I not checked the recording schedule and saw it was missing.

More and more the networks are playing these games to screw up DVR recordings and knock out competitive networks. I am hoping SageTV will come to our rescue by giving us the opportunity to have OVERLAPPING recording schedules.

For example, in the case I described above, it would have been great to have an option that would have allowed ER to still record, even if it was late due to the delay in Grey's stop time, without me having to manually change the Favorite to record 6 minutes later than the Favorite start time.

I suppose there would have to be a threshold set on this so that you would not wind up with invalid overlaps. Perhaps allow a program to record up to nn minutes late or end up to nn minutes early?

I'm sure this is driving other DVR users (i.e. TIVO, etc.) crazy too. If it's doable, the folks at SageTV would be Heroes! (Love that program!)

Cheers,
Rob

[Fluffdaddy]

The Sci-fi channel does this as well. Fortunally it always are the same shows, so I use sage's padding option to record these shows 5-10 minutes longer.
But like you I still get bit by shows I don't know about beforehand.

[Djc208]

On the plus side unlike TIVO or STBs we can add another tuner that allows both shows to record at the same time and just pad them appropriately. Not a cheap solution but the extra tuner comes with some other benefits too that help offset the cost.

[RAlfieri]

Originally Posted by Djc208

On the plus side unlike TIVO or STBs we can add another tuner that allows both shows to record at the same time and just pad them appropriately. Not a cheap solution but the extra tuner comes with some other benefits too that help offset the cost.

Good point, except I would need to get another cable box and make sure that the IR for one didn't interfere or cause cross signals with the IR for the other.

[kevine]

As long as we are talking about this, recording conflicts via email would be nice too. I know you get that icon in the top corner but half the time I ignore it. Sometimes I do not go into Sage for days to a week.

I know I could probably program itself and I know there is the SageTrayIcon. Still would be a nice feature.

[Djc208]

Originally Posted by RAlfieri

Good point, except I would need to get another cable box and make sure that the IR for one didn't interfere or cause cross signals with the IR for the other.

What about just a tuner card? You won't get all your channels but all the non-scrambled analog ones will come through and with a hybrid tuner you'd get any ClearQAM channels too.
Since most locals are offered in clearQAM a HVR-1600 or equivalent would probably let you record both Gray's and ER in HD, one from the cable box and one from the tuner card and still left an analog tuner for disney or something else.