Feature Request: More Granular Recording Station/Time Controls

Channels DVR Server Feature Requests
#1

I have a very peculiar use case where I cannot make any type of work-around get the station/time preference to work in the way I want. Here's the deal: it's about Jeopardy.

Jeopardy airs on my local CBS at 7:30pm. This is the one I want to record. However, on an ABC I receive, it airs at 7:00pm. Now, 95/100 times my advance pass setup to not record the ABC station is perfect. However, during the NCAA tournament there were a lot of preemptions on CBS that I thankfully noticed and set a manual recording for the ABC version. There are also occasional other bumps due to a local programming situation of one kind or another.

What I would really love for a pass is to say CBS @ 7:30pm > ABC @ 7:00pm > everything else in normal order. This way, I would not have to keep track of times like this and make manual adjustments.

#2

You can use 3 separate passes.

  1. Specify SeriesID, channel, and time for 7:30PM
  2. Specify SeriesID, channel, and time for 7:00PM
  3. Specify SeriesID

Then set them up in that order of priority in the DVR > Passes page in the web UI. Each morning when the guide is updated and rules/passes reevaluated, it will go through the priority list as you prefer.

(Remember when doing an advanced pass with Time CONTAINS to ensure that there is no space between the minutes and AM/PM ... Go's parser for time doesn't seem to work right when there is a space. Also, the AM/PM must be ALL CAPS.)

1 Like
#3

Huh, this was a really interesting idea, and it worked very well! I made a few modifications to make it even a little more flexible:

  1. Series ID == , Tags == New, Channel != one that doesn't come in so great, Time CONTAINS 7:30pm
  2. Series ID == , Tags == New, Channel != one that doesn't come in so great, Time CONTAINS 7:00pm
  3. Series ID == , Tags == New, Channel != one that doesn't come in so great

This results in:

  • Priority 1 matches 5
  • Priority 2 matches 5
  • Priority 3 matches 11 (the ABC is replaying the latest episode over the weekend but it still has the New tag).

And when I look at the priority scheduler, you can see that only Priority 1 has all of the upcoming schedule:

image

And with this setup, the scheduler acknowledges my general priority of favorites and OTA vs. TVE, too:

image

So basically I end up with On Time Local Favorite OTA CBS > On Time Local TVE CBS > On Time In Range non-Favorite CBS OTA > Early ABC (in general order) > Everything else except OTA station that doesn't come in so great but has a higher number and would be priority otherwise.

Nice workaroud, @racameron! We'll have to see how it ends up working during a preemption at some point, but I can see how this should be just fine. FYI, before you made your edit about Time, I originally put in == but it changed automatically to CONTAINS when I saved, so apparently the DEVs have idiot proofed that one from me. And I actually have my AM/PM lower case and it is working, but that might be because my server is Windows. Have dealt with lovely case stuff when dealing with UNIX/LINUX stuff in the past and know what a pain it can be.

But my request still stands because this was way more work!

Feature Request: Respect source priority when scheduling a simulcast (program on multiple channels)
Multiple CBS Affiliates
#4

IIRC, the issue wasn't Windows vs. *nix, but rather the whole underlying library that handles time (between the OS and Channels) has the peculiarities. However, the lowercase am/pm issue was raised some time ago, so perhaps they implemented a method to clean up the input.

In any case, glad it seems to be working out. If you don't have anything going on with your DVR right now, you may want to try a Settings > Guide Database > Maintenance > Delete and Recreate Database, that way the guide data will be current, and all recording rules will be reevaluated.