Does DVR look for alternate airings?

Channels DVR Server
#1

Hi there,

Been using Channels DVR for 1-2 months and basically swear by it now.

One question. I see on my schedule in 1 hour that, for as far as I know the first time, I have more shows scheduled to record than I have tuners on my HDHomerun Prime.

I used to be a TiVo user and one of the strengths of TiVo was that in situations like this it would automatically go and find an alternate airing for the lowest priority show (i.e. if you have 3 tuners and 4 shows scheduled simultaneously, it’d take the show with lowest priority and find another time when the same episode is airing and record that instead).

Simply put: does Channels DVR do that? If not, what’s going to happen in an hour? Specifically, I have 3 60 minute shows starting at 11p Eastern and 1 2+ hour movie starting at 1130p Eastern.

1 Like
#2

Whether another airing records depends on the pass you have setup. If it’s set to record “New” only, then no other airings would match. If it’s set to record “All” and is unable to record an airing, it will try to record another airing.

However, we haven’t done too much testing for this scenario and I’m not sure how long it will take the DVR to notice the failure and try to reschedule another airing. It might not happen until hours later, in which case it would miss the second airing in case it was an encore.

Please send over your logs later tonight or tomorrow (to [email protected]) and I’ll see what we can do to improve things.

#3

Ah! That makes perfect sense, thank you. I think TiVo had some logic where even if I set it to only look for “new” episodes, if it failed to have a tuner free for a new ep it’d automatically go find the next re-airing. Which was admittedly pretty nifty.

The movie I have set to record at 1130p is going to be the “odd man out” in this scenario and because it’s a movie I don’t have any option to set to New only. I assume a movie gets treated like it’s set to record “all” (I notice whenever I set one to record the DVR queues all airings and then just records one of them). So I’ll see in a bit if it just skips the airing tonight, in which case I assume it’d pass on to the next queued airing (which is on Friday).

I’ll send my logs in any event. Thanks!