Advanced Passes: Multiple CONTAINS/EXCLUDES (prerelease)

tmm1 · April 30, 2021, 1:11am

In the latest prerelease (v2021.04.30.0104), you can now specify multiple CONTAINS/EXCLUDES clauses on advanced passes.

Multiple CONTAINS for a single field are ORd together. So to record from one of two channels only, you can use:

Channel CONTAINS 2.1
Channel CONTAINS 1005

Multiple EXCLUDES for a single field are ANDd together. So to record all seasons of a show except season 10 and 11, you can use:

SeasonNumber EXCLUDES 10
SeasonNumber EXCLUDES 11

It is now also easier to build one pass for primetime, using a combination of rules like:

Time CONTAINS 8pm
Time CONTAINS 9pm
Time EXCLUDES Saturday
Time EXCLUDES Sunday

chDVRuser · April 30, 2021, 4:29am

Thanks Aman! Looking forward to kicking the tires on it.
Added a link in the playground, delete it if you don't want it there.

Fofer · April 30, 2021, 11:02am

Very cool, will be checking it out. Can this also be used to exclude shows from a source? For example, if I wanted to exclude STIRR from a Advanced Pass, and only use that particular source for live viewing. Or is there another way to achieve the same?

hancox · April 30, 2021, 11:04am

This works for my suggestion - being able to use tuner failover like a regular recording. Awesome.

1 bug, though

Bug: I had an existing pass with 1 Channel==. I added 2 CONTAINS to mimic my tuner failover. I went to X out the Channel==, and it didn't remove the rule, and duplicated one of the CONTAINS ones. I needed to cancel out, and edit a rule by removing the == first, and then it worked fine.

_Mike · April 30, 2021, 2:03pm

Thanks @tmm1!

I am hoping that your next act of Advanced Pass awesomness will be to allow negative padding so we can record only the first hour of a 2-hour show, for example. There have been several requests for this over the years:

https://community.getchannels.com/search?q=negative%20padding

tmm1 · April 30, 2021, 3:21pm

Hmm I tried that and could not reproduce the bug. Does it happen every time?

hancox · April 30, 2021, 3:28pm

Happened the two times I tried. The key is to keep the == rule "live" while you attempt to add 2 EXCLUDES.

daphatty · April 30, 2021, 3:45pm

Oh hell yes! I totally need this on my Family Guy advanced pass!

Downloading now!

daphatty · April 30, 2021, 3:54pm

Just to confirm, this new functionality only affects CONTAINS and EXCLUDES within a given Advanced Pass, correct? Multiple >/< commands like the example below should not be possible quite yet.

Edit - Figured I'd share what the equivalent Conditions to the above example look like using all EXCLUDE criteria. Same end result, albeit quite a bit more effort. Hopefully this many exclusions doesn't have performance implications.

While these screenshots aren't of the same Advanced Pass, they do show what the configuration would be like for an advance pass intended to capture only the earliest and latest seasons of a given show while ignoring stuff in the middle.

racameron · April 30, 2021, 4:11pm

I think you have it backwards. The listing above is for seasons 2-9, and 19 and later. What you describe would be using "CONTAINS" instead of "EXCLUDES".

daphatty · April 30, 2021, 4:13pm

Actually, using CONTAINS would eventually break when the next season starts. You'd have to manually edit the pass and add the new season number to avoid a missed recording. Using EXCLUDES in this scenario will never fail because the middle seasons will never change.

tmm1 · April 30, 2021, 4:25pm

Excluding all the seasons you want to skip is the intended solution here. I know the UI is still pretty rough when trying to add a bunch of values for the same entry and hopefully that part gets better over time.

I'm still fleshing out the backend here. I think there may be some bugs in the EXCLUDES so let me know if its not working as expected.

tmm1 · April 30, 2021, 5:24pm

Thanks I was able to reproduce. The bug is fixed in v2021.04.30.1705

tmm1 · April 30, 2021, 8:11pm

Starting with prerelease v2021.04.30.1959, passes can now have negative start or end padding.

These options are available in the advanced editor for a pass.

tmm1 · April 30, 2021, 9:07pm

Starting with v2021.04.30.2104, the advanced editor for passes allows custom values in seconds for start/end padding.

_Mike · May 1, 2021, 12:24pm

@tmm1 I discovered a small bug with the new padding feature. I record the Today Show daily. Monday-Friday, the show is 2 hours. I only want to record the first hour so I set the padding to stop recording 60 minutes before the end of the show. However, on Saturday the show is only 1 hour. So the padding setting effectively told it to stop recording as soon as it started, which resulted in a 0-minute recording.

hancox · May 1, 2021, 12:39pm

Am i missing the bug? You would need 2 passes to accomplish this with a 1 hour pad, unless i'm misreading.

_Mike · May 1, 2021, 3:59pm

Sure it could be done with two passes, but a single pass probably shouldn’t create a zero minute recording.

hancox · May 1, 2021, 4:19pm

it's math, though - you're telling the DVR to subtract 60 mins from the end time

tmm1 · May 1, 2021, 4:31pm

What did you expect would happen?