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

[racameron]

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.

If I recall, the issue is that you are recording multiple series. And while they all have the same tittle, their SeriesID is different. If that is indeed the root issue, then the issue isn't really with Channels, but rather Gracenote, as they provide the guide data that drives Channels.

I'm not sure that I buy into the argument that recording every occurrence of multiple series and having the DVR maintain only a single recording of all series in aggregate isn't an edge case.

Unfortunately, because of the way that Channels seems to be engineered, it's simply not possible to set commercial detection in the recording rule, because that particular flag seems to be paired with a series. You can either make a recording of each program that falls into your rule with its Keep setting disabled, then change the Detect Commercials setting for that program to Off. After you've done this to each program that will be captured, you can manually delete the now unneeded episodes and adjust your rule's Keep setting. While this is a bit of effort and time initially, it ought to leave the DVR in a state to satisfy your use.

[kylecopeland]

@racameron Advanced Pass Subscriptions let you use a bunch of different criterion for how to record what you want to record. For instance if I wanted to have only the latest baseball game for my favorite team and that team moves channels and is based on a title you will have different IDs.

The gracenote data is correct here. These are different programs.

I get that Channels seems to be engineered in a way currently that this use case falls through the cracks. At the end of the day it's just software and can be changed if they understand the feedback and feel it's worth changing.

To be clear, what you propose is exactly what I have done. So you missed that. And I said a few posts back that it was a one and done acceptable task for me to do to unblock myself at least on the commercial skip side. That's assuming that commercial skip is even blocking me here - it actually may not be. If it is I'm fine with not doing commercial skip for these, if it's not (again I don't think it is) I'd rather have the commercial skip there if it can be.. it's nice.

Based on what was said by the engineer who was nice enough to look at the code. I also believe that the issue I'm having is NOT the commercial skip (it could be helping to contribute) but in fact the issue is that if I record 6 News casts in the 3 hour window between prunes.. I get to see all 6 in the UI until the prune happens even though the series is set to Keep 1. I also think that if this is correct that the prune situation would happen to ANYONE who has a season pass with Keep 1 and there is a marathon that hits that suddenly will keep around more than you want for a 3 hour window. This just makes it seem broken. My original ask.. and it's still the same ask.. is if I can set the system up to just fire off a prune maintenance for cleaning up Keep Until Windows after every recording is triggered. Perhaps that's too expensive an operation on the system, perhaps it's not. From what I can tell hitting the URL endpoint it seems to happen very quickly when triggered manually. So I'm hopeful they can make that change and it will give the illusion that the platform is doing exactly the behavior I want. (I don't care that they are laying around in the trash.. that's fine)

KC

[tmm1]

Pruning is not expensive, but in the past things were deleted right away which seemed dangerous. Now that we have the Trash feature, it seems more reasonable to make it more frequent. In the past we also did not provide a "Keep 1" option, because there were bugs where an episode could be deleted while you were still watching it.

Doing things every few hours was the simplest way to get started when this code was written years ago. I could reduce the interval now, but that's also not ideal as I don't want to be waking up sleeping computers and drives unnecessarily when there's nothing to prune.

Maybe the pruner could be kicked off after every successful recording that came from a season pass with a keep rule?

[kylecopeland]

I figured there was a history as to why it is the way it is today.

Maybe the pruner could be kicked off after every successful recording that came from a season pass with a keep rule?\

This is exactly what I would propose sounds like it would check all the right boxes from the user experience standpoint. Do I need to kill the commercial skip rule on these or will a prune happen even if it's trying to do the commercial skip?