Back to back recordings problem

[Phydeaux]

Just curious how other people get around this problem I'm having.

Sage is set to record a series. But the series is running two different episodes back to back: eg. 7:00-7:30 and 7:30-8:00 on the same channel. Ideally Sage would just make a single recording of 1 hour, however it doesn't do that. I stops recording at 7:30 and starts a new recording right away. However it will just about always clip the first few seconds off of the second episode.

I know that instead of setting up a series I could just do a manual, scheduled 1hr recording every week at that time period. However the series doesn't always run two episodes back to back - it's seemingly a random thing. PBS has done this to kick off rerunning an old series - episode 1&2 for the first week only, for example. Or trying to generate interest in reruns of the past season of The Office for a couple weeks.

I could tailor the series settings to end recording a minute early I suppose, but sometimes there is a risk of cutting off the final few seconds of the episode...

Any ideas?

RLW

[MeInMaui]

If you have multiple tuners available, you can add a couple minutes of padding to the beginning and end and disable the option to remove padding on back-to-back favorites.

Aloha,
Mike

[Phydeaux]

Pretty sharp idea Mike. Unfortuantely I don't have a second tuner though.

Thanks, good thought for the future.

RLW

[alfi33]

If you have two tuners you could pad a minute to the end of the recording. This would give you a 1 minute overlap between episodes.

EDIT: Oops.....too slow.

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by Phydeaux

Pretty sharp idea Mike. Unfortuantely I don't have a second tuner though.

Thanks, good thought for the future.

RLW

Sounds like a good excuse to go shopping!

Assuming you're on cable, PBS is usually one of the channels that cable companies transmit in the clear (along with your other locals) and probably in HD. You can pick up an HDHomerun for around $150 and it will give you 2 additional digital tuners for those unencrypted channels.

Aloha,
Mike

[freedml]

You need a 2nd tuner to pad on the same channel? Sage can't use the same tuner and put the overlapping minute in both files?

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by freedml

You need a 2nd tuner to pad on the same channel? Sage can't use the same tuner and put the overlapping minute in both files?

No. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. You need two tuners.

Aloha,
Mike

[Fuzzy]

If this is a rare special case, I'd go ahead and make the first show a manual recording, and add a 30 minute stop pad to it. This way it will record uninterrupted, on a single tuner, and show up as one single recording in the guide.

[Phydeaux]

I appreciate all the suggestions folks. Sounds like the easiest is to play around with padding. The idea of a second tuner is interesting, but brings it's own challenges. And frankly I don't record enough volume to really make use of more than one tuner. It's rare that I see a recording conflict - I just don't record enough.

Mike, no I don't have cable. I'm out the boonies of Western Canada, an hour outside of the nearest cable provider. No Internet either (well, unless you count dial-up). I'm using a satelite STB with a R5000 hardwired in. Haven't played around with FTA because I'm told there is roughly zero worthwhile content available in our province.

Thanks, all!

RLW