Possible new feature: Auto extend recording

It can be annoying to have a recording that cuts off before the program has finished airing because it was delayed.

Would it be possible to auto extend the end time for a recording if the preceding program is a live event, like a sporting game, political debate, etc, in case the program runs over?

I am not even sure if that situation can be detected or not, but I would help save some recordings.

This isn’t a bad idea. We currently prompt you when you record a live airing, to see if you want to extend the time just in case.

Doing this to airings that come after live ones could be helpful too.

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IME, TVE is always 1 minute delayed. DVR should just automatically add 1 minute if a scheduled recording or pass chooses a TVE channel. I find myself periodically checking to see if any scheduled recordings are going to use a TVE channel, just so I can add 1 minute end padding.... this padding is required for any channel on the TVE tuner. I don't want to add a default padding to all channels though, because, barring live events, OTA starts and ends at exactly the right time, pretty much to the second. And it is cool to have recordings that start and end at precisely the correct time.

Since there is no further calculation or schedule modification required (beyond recording an extra minute for TVE), the TVE padding adjustment should be doable programatically.

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Automatically extending the recording time for live sporting events is really the only feature that I'm missing coming from SageTV. Sage has a plugin that used to work great for me and was a big 'quality of life' improvement. There are few things worse than your dvr missing the end of a game because you forgot to manually extend the recording time or, even if you did remember, it was insufficient to record the entire game (see: triple overtime NHL).

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Channels will prompt you to extend the recording time anytime you attempt to manually record any airing that is Live.

Additionally, Team Passes have a way to extend the length of every recording as well.

I’m curious what is missing.

Auto extend feature from other DVR software I believe checks a sports website and if the game is still in progress will extend the end time automatically... It keeps checking and extending if needed.

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Ahh I see, in real time.

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Yes

I believe they usually use Gracenote for the data, who not only provides TV listings (and is used by Channels, DirecTV, etc.), also sports data for many websites.

Gracenote provides information for sports broadcasts including additional information, such as current score, and whether an sporting event is still in progress and whether the broadcast is continuing beyond its scheduled time. (Schedules Direct includes this info for MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL events; they may also include other leagues as Gracenote's data and spread has increased in the past couple of years.) Whether Channels' agreement with Gracenote includes access to this data though, I do not know.

This is one of the big features I miss from SageTV as well. In fact I still have STV recording sports just in case. Not sure if it could be done with non-sport programming, but even if just sports it's a great feature that I haven't seen anywhere but on STV.

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With the current Stanley Cup Playoffs having a lot of overtime games, I'm reminded of this missing feature. And by "reminded" I mean that I miss the end of a game because of an incomplete recording. :sob:

For this reason I set all sports recordings to have a very long end padding. This feature would be great but I’m sure identifying when the sporting event ends is not a trivial thing to implement. As far as I know other services that do this are using humans to do it. That’s feasible for a services where all the recordings are stored in the cloud, but obviously not for something like Channels.

A thought just occurred to me… if there was a free online source of sporting event scores and Channels could match the event to the online source, it could poll for when the game changed to a “final” and only stop recording then. Even this idea would be non-trivial to implement but it’s an option that wouldn’t require analyzing the video itself, at least. Tons of work either way.

I used SageTV for many years and it has a plugin that does this - no human intervention required: Sage Recording Extender 4 (SREv4)

I don't know where it sources its data for the different leagues but MLB publishes a "live" json feed. For example, http://gd.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/year_2021/month_05/day_27/master_scoreboard.json