College Football season is just around the corner and with more than 20 games being broadcast on most Saturdays I’d like to be able to record a lot of partial games. With our TiVo Bolts and with Windows Media Center, I’ve typically recorded just the last 30 minutes of a slotted game with a 30 padding at the end. That enables me to catch the deciding portions of games so I can watch the ones that end up having great finishes.
Is there any way to do something like that with Channels DVR?
Thanks!
Very interesting use-case. There’s no easy way to do this unfortunately. How did it work on Tivo and WMC? Did you just add start/end times, or select the game and adjust its padding somehow to start it late?
I am also intrigued in being able to utilize. Great idea @tluxon. ! Will be following this thread closely to see if Channels can be tweaked for this use case.
For the TiVo, there’s a “Set Up a Manual Recording” option that has 5 fields to set:
How Often, Day, Channel, Start, Stop
Fields are initially populated by Once, [Current Day], [Active Tuner’s Current Channel], [Current Time rounded down to nearest half hour], [30 minutes after Start]
How Often can be Once or Every
If Once, Day can be any single date from current on forward
If Every, Day choices are Every day, Every Sun, Every Mon, Every Tue, Every Wed, Every Thu, Every Fri, Every Sat, or Every M-F.
WMC is quite similar, but instead of an Every M-F choice, there’s a “Multiple” option that lists the days with checkboxes next to each of them for even more flexibility. This can also be very useful as a workaround for series recordings that may yield undesirable results when left to automatic algorithms.
For the metadata, TiVo uses the guide data of the program that lines up with the start time of the recording. WMC doesn’t populate any guide information other than the channel and recording start time.
With the ChannelMaster DVR+ it’s a bit non-obvious, but you go to the guide, click on a show, choose “Manual” from the drop-down menu, then you can choose channel, start time, stop time, begin and end padding, then Repeat: None, Daily, Weekdays, Mon, Tue…, Sun.
My wife had to do that for a program that was repeated on multiple PBS stations at multiple times of the day and night, some of which were new and some repeats she hadn’t seen when new. It was the only way to keep from being blitzed with reams of repetitive recordings.
I've kept up my ChannelsDVR subscription, but I haven't really been using it and staying on top of any changes. Has anything happened along the lines of doing a manual record or padding the end of a scheduled program for those shows that are either excessively long in the guide or run beyond the timeslot provided for the program in the guide?