Any easy way to do this?

[Yalbik]

Here's my situation:

I want to set up my favorites so that certain favorites NEVER record on HD channels, and other favorites ONLY record on HD channels.

The reason is that I have an HD projector hooked up to my server, and 2 Media MVP's hooked up to SD TV's elsewhere in the house. For many of the shows (cartoons, news, reality, etc.) I don't want them to record in HD so my family can watch them anywhere.

For a few shows I only want HD as we only watch them on the projector.

I just painfully went through all 67 of our favorites and assigned each to HD or non-HD channels as appropriate, based on which had future airings on the appropriate channels.

Problem is when our cable company shuffles channels or when shows switch networks, I'll have to do this again. Even worse, if this happens, I may start missing recordings without knowing immediately.

Also, I have good way to determine whether I assigned the favorites right. As the TV season is just starting, some of the shows have no future airings so I have no idea what channel to assign them. I don't want to have to enable recording on 60+ SD channels.

What I'd really like is one of the following:
1) Some way to assign favorites to only record on a specific tuner. I already have my HD box set to only tune HD channels, so this would accomplish most of what I want.

2) A way to set up ranges of channels and assign them to a group, then assign favorites to record from channels in a specific group. Something like this customization, but for favorites rather than for the EPG.

Based on my forum searches, I'm pretty sure neither of these options exist yet, but is there a better way to do what I'm attempting? The restrict to channel thing seems pretty fragile...

[wado1971]

Have you tried setting specific recording qualities for the favorites?

[mskitty666]

I am not familiar with the media mvp. Will it not play back hd recordings on your regular tv? I have the HD100 and it will play anything that is on my SageTV server.

[sainswor99]

Originally Posted by mskitty666

I am not familiar with the media mvp. Will it not play back hd recordings on your regular tv? I have the HD100 and it will play anything that is on my SageTV server.

The media mvp WILL play back HD recordings, but they require transcoding on the server (unlike the HD100 and HD200).

[Yalbik]

Originally Posted by wado1971

Have you tried setting specific recording qualities for the favorites?

Does that even work for HD? I'm pulling the HD signal from a motorola set-top box via firewire...I can't believe the recording quality setting can have any influence over the amount of data provided.

I'll give it a shot though...I suspect it would work if I was using a QAM tuner, but being from the frozen north, we have no clear-QAM signals up here Everything HD has to be either OTA (next project) or cable box.

[SWKerr]

You can setup a different guide for each tuner. After that you will have unique station numbers for each source\channel combination. From there you can select a specific station to record from in the advanced settings for each favorite. You can even record a HD and SD version if you want.