Advanced Pass to keep only 1 of any episode from any hit (Local News Pass)

Channels DVR Server Feature Requests
#1

Hi Folks,

We have a local news channel we like quite a bit (7 News Boston) that we currently have setup to just record the 11PM news. But ideally what we would like to do is use an Advanced Pass to grab and keep only the latest airing of the News on that channel.

We've created an Advanced Pass to accomplish this but it has one major drawback. It keeps ONE episode of every SeriesID :frowning: So we end up with 1 episode a day of each news cast on our drive and UI if we enable it)

Ideally, When choosing an Advanced Season pass there would be an option next to number of episodes to keep that says "Keep x episodes regardless of SeriesID's in this pass" vs. what it does today by default which is not ideal for a News Cast type pass.

Thoughts?

KC

37%20PM
Screen Shot 2020-05-28 at 12.07.37 PM.png1862×908 109 KB

#2

Huh, the series changes every day?

#3

@tmm1 No, sorry if I was unclear. The 7 News channel in Boston runs News most of the evening in a repeating cycle. the seriesID changes every Hour or Half Hour as the day progresses. Each show has it's own SeriesID (and it's own listing in the Guide). They are either 1/2 hour or 1 hour depending on the time of day.

So the ask is, if you are recording as part of an Advanced Pass, can the next recording just know it is part of that pass and remove the prior recording once the new recording is done. At maximum, There should be no more than 2 in flight at any one time. I'm actually fine with there being only one in flight as well (if I'm recording a new one just get rid of the old one (unless someone is watching it).

37%20PM
Screen Shot 2020-05-28 at 12.37.37 PM.png2816×170 64.3 KB

28%20PM
Screen Shot 2020-05-28 at 12.38.28 PM.jpg3284×2110 1.19 MB

#4

Once the rule starts to play out the issue is that it's using up a ton of space for quite literally "old news" but it's also gobbling up the entire What's Next view. Living on a smaller SD card right now for my storage leads me to have to tighten the belt. I've gone back to just recording the 11PM News only, but it would be awesome to just be able to watch whatever one was last recorded whenever I want.

Even if this was it's own category like TV, Movies ... "News" where "News" had a special property to only keep one of any channel would be super. Grasping at straws but seems like this would be a need others would enjoy as well if the functionality made it easy.

KC

26%20PM
Screen Shot 2020-05-28 at 6.12.26 PM.jpg3496×1908 1.46 MB

#5

I'm not sure why your rule isn't working, but I think you might be the only one running into this. I have a couple news programs—BBC World News, PBS Newshour, etc.— and they're set to keep only the 2 most recent recordings, and have never had an issue like you're experiencing.

It sounds like it may be something more related to the guide, such as different time slots having different series identifiers, than an actual bug.

Perhaps your could offer more details, as I'm trying to follow along in your explanation, but am still confused.

#6

I checked the code and the pruner does not care what series is being recorded.. it should apply to all recordings that originated from a season pass, and respect the keep settings accordingly.

#7

@tmm1 thanks for checking the code. That seems to be consistent with what I thought. It’s not working as intended then for me for some reason. Anything I can provide that would be useful to troubleshoot.

These just pile up, if I let them go for multiple days it keeps one of each but only the last days worth of each episode.

The names of each are different, the IDs are different is it possible in the advanced case the code isn’t pruning on the ID of the subscription and instead is keying off the Name or something else? That’s what it feels like.

#8

@racameron I believe the differences is I’m taping different shows all with different names on the same channel. “News at Noon” “News at 4” “ News at 5” etc. each with their own ID for that time slot. The guide data is correct from what I can see. these are different shows not the same show aired again that same day.

For shows that are a single taping on a single day (like The Daily Show) I’m able to have only one recording kept.

Check out the screen shots I think they make my use case pretty clear. If not please do ask more questions as i may not be explaining it correctly.

#9

Can you click Help > Submit Diagnostics

#10

Also try running the pruner manually:

Then check the Log to see what was deleted. You might still have to empty from the Trash as well.

#12

@tmm1 Logs have been submitted as a2a63454-9755-443d-bab2-42b2876b524a .

Oddly this evening things started working as expected and the old backlog of recordings cleaned themselves up to show only the latest so something must have clogged up the pruner for a little while. I’m wondering if perhaps a backlog of checking for commercials or something? What’s the normal timing on the reaper?

I’ll keep an eye on it tomorrow. I see the log link in there now under help (had no idea it was there) and will try snooping on it. Is there a setting to ask an advanced schedule pass to never put deleted items for that pass in the trash? I’ll be sucking up about 8-9 hours of HD news and only watching about 1-2 hours of it a day depending on when we decide to watch. If not no big deal. If this ends up working well we will probably find a android streamer with good horsepower and a coveted USB port :slight_smile:

#13

Yes it looks like it waited until all the back to back recording / commercial detection happened before pruning I think.

2020/05/28 19:23:06.033316 [DVR] Pruning old recording 7 News at 530PM 2020-05-28-1730.mpg
2020/05/28 19:23:06.039366 [DVR] Pruning old recording 7 News at 5PM 2020-05-28-1700.mpg
2020/05/28 19:23:06.042902 [DVR] Pruning old recording 7 News at 430PM 2020-05-28-1630.mpg
2020/05/28 19:23:06.046241 [DVR] Pruning old recording 7 News at Noon 2020-05-28-1203.mpg

I had paused the season pass which made it stop clogging up the works.

Commercial detection seems slow in the shield. Shame we can’t fire up the Tegra AI cores :slight_smile: bet it would fly.

#14

Hmm, the pruner should be running every 3 hours regardless of what else is happening..

#15

Ahh is there a way to have you run the pruner more often? I see that it’s very much aware that it’s doing the new recording as part of the advanced schedule. Can that be used as a trigger to fire off a prune. For news I only really care about what the latest available is so there is no need to keep any around. In 3 hours I could have 6 1/2 hour news programs queues up during the day. Is pruning somehow expensive operation? Why is it going so sparingly?

I did try manually running curl To fire off a prune tonight with the url above and It didn’t seem to do anything in the logs I did get a “true” returned from the call. It would seem /deleted is not the right end point for instantly enforcing the keep 1 of an advance schedule. I did just /dvr/pruner and it worked in a few seconds. I’m guessing the /deleted is to empty the trash if the time has gone by appropriately.

So I guess the question remains - why 3 hours? Can there be a global setting somewhere to let me choose to prune after every recording is finished? I’m not sure I get the trade off to run it on a wider schedule seems like from poking around the forums tonight it was 24 hours before. This seems to break the keep x intent doesn’t it?

Would love to see this smoothed out without me needing to make a call from another server in the home to force the behavior I would like if it’s not horribly expensive on the DVR to do the prune exercise.

#16

If I understand you correctly you are creating many hours of recordings each and every day. Leaving commercial detection enabled for this pass is likely causing it to run almost continually to try and keep up. I’m not sure but as you speculated I’m betting the pruner will not take any action on a show that is waiting for commercial detection, or has it in progress.

This might explain the issue.

#17

@Macnbaish It seems to be a combination of both the 3 hour prune process schedule and possibly the commercial skip (although @tmm1 mentioned that prune will win over any other process in action)

I don't see a way in the UI to turn off commercial skip for a particular pass, is this possible? I'm happy to turn it off for the news if it would help.

#18

Only from the web UI: Recordings > Shows > All > Series Name > Settings (Cog icon) > Show Settings > Detect Commercials

#19

Ok.. so I need to go into each recording today as they are happening in each time slot and turn them off individually. Then hopefully they will be remembered. It's sort of amazing this isn't a setting that can be set at the Pass Schedule level vs. on the show level. The assumption that the Pass covers only one show is what gets me into trouble here possibly.

I'll undelete a bunch from yesterday and set the flags and see if that helps today as a one time thing that shouldn't be so bad to test with.

I still think my 3 hour prune schedule timer will keep these around and piling up especially in the period of the day where they do 1/2 hour fresh news segments back to back.

KC

#20

While you cannot set the commercial detection from a rule (which rules out rules that may not have a particular series, or may cover multiple series), there is a workaround: you can disable commercial detection in general, then selectively enable it for new programs as they record.

Edit: I know it's frustrating, but when you create edge cases that are a bit outside the normal workflows, bugs and inconsistencies tend to show up much more frequently.

#21

@racameron I appreciate the help and your commentary. However, I'm not entirely sure I buy into the assumption that it's "outside the normal workflow" to want to record the local news and have only the latest copy of the news be available.

If you step back a little and look at the behavior of the platform, yes my situation is indeed pressing on a deficiency of the platform. The Keep Only logic actually doesn't work in real time, it batches. So for any program that you have set to keep only one, a marathon in the program guide could very well create the same issue.

I also don't think it's a good workaround to turn off commercial skipping broadly and then try to remember to turn it on for every new season pass going forward. It's far better to just turn it off on a per program basis by keeping the programatic hourly and half hourly naming of the programs and finding them and turning it off for each one if the setting is indeed sticky per program. It's a one and done thing these names are predictable. Ideally you should be able to choose the various behaviors of what the platform will do with the recordings at the time that the recordings are scheduled. It's less work for the end user and it will behave the way the end user expects, not to mention more transparent as to why the behavior is happening or not happening.