Sometimes when my wife and I are watching a program, she will ask me to record the show so that she can watch it again later. When we had DirecTV we could just hit the record button on the remote and the program would be recorded, including the portion of the program that we had already viewed. With Channels, it seems that the only way to record a program you are already watching is to use the Record Now feature of the web UI Guide, which loses the buffer. One way to implement this would be a press and hold the trackpad, followed by a confirmation request.
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You can record the program youâre watching by swiping down and clicking the Record button.
This doesnât record the buffer though- it starts when you hit record.
Can you add the functionality to retain the buffer?
The DVR does not record a buffer. So there is nothing there to retain.
The buffer is on the Apple TV, but the recording is on the DVR computer. So itâs not very easy. The directv DVR is all in the same box so itâs much easier for them.
I have faith in you! 
Would tuner sharing allow this, or doesnât it keep a buffer?
Tuner sharing doesnât buffer, just multiplexes. The buffer is still on the Apple TV.
Are you forced by Apple to put the buffer on the ATV? Since the recording is on the DVR computer, couldnât you rewrite the app to always record to the DVR computer and discard it when the channel changes or the app is unloaded, unless the user intentionally hits record or the program has been scheduled to be recorded?
I think you all should refactor your recording paradigm to mirror what SageTV (arguably one of the best DVRs ever made).
How it worked is that basically anytime you watched something you were basically ârecordingâ. It was just recording all the time. It also didnât wipe out this recorded buffer upon channel switch. It only wiped it out if 2 conditions were met. A) you didnât select to truly record/save the show for later viewing. B) The show had finished airing.
This provided 2 major benefits.
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You could easily persist the buffer if you decided that the show you were half way into watching you wanted to save for a later date.
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If you watched say channel 2 for 15 minutes and then switched to channel 4 for 10 minutes and then switched back to channel 2 you still had those 15 minutes of buffer when you first started watching availability to you, just with a 10minute gap (from when you were watching channel 4). This was freaking amazing to have!!
The downside to this, is the complexity to the DVR engine it adds. You need to mange all these recording buffers and clean them up appropriately. I think this is worth the complexity. I also think the community would love this if they got to experience it. Cable boxes donât even offer this capability. SageTV is open source these days and was written in Java so devs you can check it out if you are willing to look into this. No other DVR software to this date has been able to pull it off. But if anybody can do it, I think you all can.
Btw. You guys really need a life time option. Iâm dying a death of many low dollar bills. Let me just give you a few hundred and we call it even. Or do some paid upgrades for major version releases.
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some users like to use other HDHomeRun software alongside with Channels, sometimes on ATV or a computer or a phone even. If Channels DVR uses all of the tuners and doesnât release them, a user would be restricted to using only Channels.
I didnât suggest it wouldnât release the tuner. It would release it upon channel change (or app close) hence thatâs why you would have a 10 minute gap when you switched back to channel 2 in the example I posted.
This solution would not cause any extra tuner usage then what is being done today. The difference is in how channels DVR records and how it manages buffers.
The DVR does not manage buffers. They are on the ATV. So you are saying that you want to keep a buffer with gaps in it? I would rather use multiple tuners and not have a gap. This would cause extra tuner usage though. It might even prevent recordings from happening if you are using all the tuners to watch live tv. But maybe it could be an option to turn on, set to off by default.
Perhaps this is too obvious, but it sounds like you had been watching the show from the beginning and then decided you wanted to keep a recording of it. If that is the case, all you need to do is rewind to the beginning of the show, assuming the buffer is big enough to get you to the beginning, then, as tmm1 wrote, swipe down on the remote and select the record option. I think that when you do this the buffer will be transferred into the DVR as a recording.
It didnât work when I tried it just now.
That definitely wont work. The DVR records a stream from the HDHR, not your Apple TV.
Well, I am sorry to get your hopes up Tom. I thought I had tried this and had it work, but sent off my post away from home without testing first. That makes perfect sense what you said Dave, and I like the suggestions that you made to the developers. The good news is that the developers of this app and DVR have greatly raised the level of our expectations. Good for us, but hard for them!
If you want to keep the buffer without gaps you would select to record the channel, that would then lock in the tuner. You are then free to switch to another channel (now using another 2nd tuner). But with this paradigm You get tons of flexibility since the DVR is basically always ârecordingâ. Itâs a different approach to DVR and SageTV did this wonderfully, I myself didnât quite get it until I saw it action, but it was a game changer (hence why google bought SageTV to power their cable service)
I wonder if this is making sense to the developers.
I think itâs simple to explain: when I user starts viewing a channel, create a phantom ârecordingâ on the DVR in the background, which could then be the âbufferâ on the ATV. The DVR would only keep this ârecordingâ if the user subsequently chose to record the programme, and then the âbufferâ would be saved as well.
That being said, Iâm not sure how much extra coding work would be involved to get it to behave this way. Though since we already have tuner sharing with the DVR, I doesnât seem like it would be a stretch to save the stream on the DVR at the same time as sending it out to 1 or more ATVs.
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