random manual recordings

[dvdfreak]

Originally Posted by tourettes

I find that pretty offending as for example TVE3's scheduler hasnt ever missed a recording on my HTPC for the last 8 months. Few times the recording hasn't been done properly, but it has been TsWriter issue (and the same issue would have happened with the 4TR.

I certainly didn't mean to offend, with reliable I meant For The Record will still correctly record a program even when the show's beginning and/or end-times move (as long as your guide data itself it correctly updated of course), or when there's a conflict to be handled (good priority support). Stuff like that. The actual recording is indeed still handled by TV Server itself, and we're all indeed happy that it has been doing this very reliably!

Originally Posted by tourettes

The possible for mere flexible recordings is a nice thing, that I dont dont deny Personally I dont need any of 4TR advanced recording possibilities as I use two types of recordings 1) one time schedule (for random programs that I cannot make any rules) 2) record always on this channel (for series).

btw. any possibility to open up the 4TR source codes under GPL? Would be a nice thing as your works is based on completely open souce code (TVE3).

Well, the work itself isn't actually based on open-source code, it has all been developed from scratch But it does hook into open-source products like TV Server and MediaPortal, that's a fact

Well, I lie: the MediaPortal GUI plugin is based on the open-source TV Plugin from TV Server. And we will be making this open-source too actually. As well as all the source code to all our recorder/tuners, like the TV Server recorder/tuner. Currently only the API to For The Record in on the site, but the source code will follow soon and if someone really wants it like today I'll be happy to zip something up and send it to him or her by PM.

Originally Posted by SciDoctor

The only failure/odditiy with the schedule logic within MP is the 'record at this time...' as it doesn't parse program name and check time changes/differences within EPG data;it is realy specific to TIME only.

Also extending this is that if and when EPG data is changed in the future, historicaly set schedules aren't remapped to new times for schedules, epeacialy tiresomefor 'everytime...' schedules.

Well, yes, it's exactly these things and stuff like missing priority support and very confusing conflict management in MP that led to the development of For The Record. And of course I'm very biased in this matter: but it does all these things a whole lot better if you ask me

I'm from Belgium myself and programs' starting times are far from constant here, so MP's built-in scheduling was fairly useless to me unless you used "Always on this channel" which didn't help out in many cases due to all repeats being recorded as well then.

So it's all a matter of whether these things mean enough to you to warrant an extra installation.

[tourettes]

Originally Posted by dvdfreak

Well, the work itself isn't actually based on open-source code, it has all been developed from scratch But it does hook into open-source products like TV Server and MediaPortal, that's a fact

Well, I lie: the MediaPortal GUI plugin is based on the open-source TV Plugin from TV Server. And we will be making this open-source too actually. As well as all the source code to all our recorder/tuners, like the TV Server recorder/tuner. Currently only the API to For The Record in on the site, but the source code will follow soon and if someone really wants it like today I'll be happy to zip something up and send it to him or her by PM.

#1 I know that 4TR is based only on new code, so its not needed to be opened under GPL licence. But it would be still nice to have such code as open source unles you are having sime business plans and plan to benefit from the free hard work put into TVE3 / MP.

#2 If some work is based on MP plugin code ten it definately needs to be published as its violating the GPL licence. But I would assume that this isn going to be any issue as the MP plugin code is not most likely including anything that you guys want to hide

Originally Posted by dvdfreak

I'm from Belgium myself and programs' starting times are far from constant here, so MP's built-in scheduling was fairly useless to me unless you used "Always on this channel" which didn't help out in many cases due to all repeats being recorded as well then.

I have considered it always as a bonus that the reruns are always recorded. Now the TVE3 can have some bug that misses the recording and the 2nd run is still getting recorded to HD. With curren HD prices its not making any difference to have 500GB or 1TB as recording storage.

[tourettes]

Originally Posted by dvdfreak

Well, yes, it's exactly these things and stuff like missing priority support and very confusing conflict management in MP that led to the development of For The Record. And of course I'm very biased in this matter: but it does all these things a whole lot better if you ask me

I guess it could have been easier to improve the TVE3 code than just to write completely new code base to handle the duplicate things

[dvdfreak]

Originally Posted by tourettes

I guess it could have been easier to improve the TVE3 code than just to write completely new code base to handle the duplicate things

Well, I actually started to do this a year or perhaps even longer ago But my changes were removed from SVN after a while due to problems (which were never explained to me actually).

But this didn't mattter that much because I realized from looking and working on MP's scheduler code that drastic measures and a new approach was required if we wanted to improve it a lot. Check out the start of the TV Scheduler thread where I proposed how to do this with what eventually became For The Record. Unfortunately there was little to no enthusiasm from the developers back then, even though I brought this up several times. So TV Scheduler grew on its own and became For The Record.

Originally Posted by tourettes

I have considered it always as a bonus that the reruns are always recorded. Now the TVE3 can have some bug that misses the recording and the 2nd run is still getting recorded to HD. With curren HD prices its not making any difference to have 500GB or 1TB as recording storage.

Sure it can be a bonus in some cases or to some users, but in For The Record this is switchable per schedule, so we let the user decide what he wants If something went wrong it will be recorded the second rerun, and if nothing went wrong it won't. I'd call this pretty damn useful and handy

[risu]

Originally Posted by dvdfreak

Well, I actually started to do this a year or perhaps even longer ago But my changes were removed from SVN after a while due to problems (which were never explained to me actually).

But this didn't mattter that much because I realized from looking and working on MP's scheduler code that drastic measures and a new approach was required if we wanted to improve it a lot. Check out the start of the TV Scheduler thread where I proposed how to do this with what eventually became For The Record. Unfortunately there was little to no enthusiasm from the developers back then, even though I brought this up several times. So TV Scheduler grew on its own and became For The Record.

I just wish someone would fix TVE3 code, for me duplicate recordings are a bit of a problem. I can't go on adding more HDDs as I don't want more noise. I currently have 50e nexus drive-away to block HDD noise and don't have any more space on my case for another 5.25 drive. Current day sata-drives aren't that queit, I've bunch of "really silent" ones and they all make noise. Yea, I could buy 1tb drive instead of current 500gb but 500gb seems pretty good now.. besides I use other 500gb external drive to back up some recordings.

I don't like installations getting bloated with tons of different software and loads of configurations. Thinking about that, MP with TV server was pretty bad for a while before automatic deploytool came along. I'd just love to see stuff like this integrated. And by that I don't mean complex recording shemes, just current ones which would simply work as user would expect them to

I kinda see points from both sides. I know MP devs don't always give you a warm welcome when you have ideas to improve stuff. There are loads of useful patches people have made which haven't actually made to SVN or if have, they've been removed after some problems has reported to follow. For new dev this can be dissappointing and leading him to make own separate solutions (as I'd see 4therecord) or even go to support more "friendly" mediaprogram community. From MP dev side I again see that people have limited resources, if some patch is likely to bring trouble it's often discarded - unless MP dev itself would like to see the feature on their own HTPC. Usually all devs have some own view what should be in software and what not regardless of teams normal policy.

[doornjoostje]

All new SATA drives have a silent mode that you can set. Perfomance down with approx 3%, but you can't hear it any more.
For samsung disks it's called NoiseGuard and SilentSeek.
This is a software solution.

Example for my harddisk:
http://www.samsung.com/global/busine...down&ppmi=1155

If you don't have enough space, you can always remove recordings or you just record too much ;-)

[risu]

Actually I know about noise management on modern HDDs. I've used silentdrive util in the past. Trouble is, it slows Vista too and it needs to access HDD a lot. Plus there's still problem that not all SATA-drives support it. I happen to have Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 on my HTPC and it doesn't support it and man that seek noise is bad there. I have Samsung T166 on my other comp but it's seek noice isn't that bad even to begin with, there it's the motor spinning and rumbling the whole drive.

Anyway I have heard HDD motors spinning on every disk I've used so far, so making a silent system needs more radical approach It's all about what you personally think is silent enough. I don't want to hear HDD seeking noises when there's a quiet moment in the movie. For desktop it would do but on HTPC I need complete silence I've heard some people even use stock CPU coolers on HTPC..

[doornjoostje]

A month or 2 ago I bought my 2nd HTPC. Functionally it is perfect now, even got suspend and resume perfectly working now together with HD TV.
Only need to make it silent now, bought a new power supply and 2 new silent fans.

But if you have 2 (or more) HDD, if your motherboard supports it, you can run in RAID0.
Don't know if you know this, but give an example with 2 HDD.

With raid0 50% is on disk 1 and 50% on disk 2.
So if you write a file 1 disk only needs to write 50% of the file, so is twice as fast.
The same for reading.
So if you need speed and silent disks, use RAID0 with NoiseGuard and SilentSeek.