A use for idle tuners / auto timeshifting (1 Viewer)

[tsamb.]

How many times do you sit down, flick on the TV, surf to a favourite channel and it's half way through something that looks really interesting...?

This has happened to me a few times where I wish I could timeshift back 15 or 20 minutes to catch the start of said program.

Is there any way to configure the TVServer to continuously timeshift given channel/s? And to take it one step further, on a DVB-T broadcast, is there any way to continuously timeshift multiple channels on the same mux?

My idea is this: My server currently has a dual DVB-T tuner that picks up three seperate muxes, each with a few channels. I would like to pick out two channels from two muxes and order them in priorities 1 through 4. Whenever a tuner is available to timeshift any of those channels, it does so.

Take this hypothetical scenario as an example:
Mux A contains channel 1, 2 and 3
Mux B contains channel 4, 5 and 6
Mux C contains channel 7, 8 and 9

My four favourite channels in order of priority are 1, 4, 3 and 6.

Timeshifting of all four of those channels occurs if the two tuners would be otherwise idle. If, however, a recording is scheduled to start on channel 8 (Mux C), one tuner would have to switch frequency to Mux C, leaving only channels 1 and 3 to be automatically timeshifted. The same would occur when watching live TV on Mux C, etc.


Depending on the length of shows you primarily watch you could set the automatic timeshift buffer to a different length (perhaps even independently by channel -- more space for movie channels, less space for sitcom channels).

The advantages of automatically timeshifting when a tuner is free:
You can skip to the start of a show on a favourite channel if you catch it half way through.
When channel surfing between favourite channels, they have already been timeshifted even though you were not actively watching or recording those channels.

The only disadvantage I can see coming from this is hardware requirement and hardware stress. Continuously timeshifting 4+ streams, say 2 HD and 2 SD, each with a half-hour buffer would result in approximately 5 gigs of write data every hour. That's 120GB per day at 24/7 timeshifting. That's a lot of work for a consumer HDD. Definitely a job for a dedicated drive or drives. Intel's new SSDs are stated to take 100GB of write data per day for 5 years without data loss and with a drive that is solely dedicated to timeshifting, you could use a relatively small sized drive.

Perhaps one way to cut down on wear and tear is to auto timeshift only in the hours you are most likely to watch television at a whim. Turn off auto timeshifting between 9 and 5 when everyone's at work. Turn it off between 12am and 6am when everyone's asleep. Keep it on from 6am-1am in the weekends, etc.

What are your ideas on this?

 

[jonaskp]

Although it seems like a nice idea, I think there is one problem with it (for some people): WAF!

How do you explain other non-tehcnical users of the system that "sometimes" you "may" be able to see the start of a program, if they sit in on it halfway through. And "sometimes" it may not be the beginning, if the show you missed has been running for more than 30min?
I know that my girlfriend would find this rather mystic and strange, and probably end up never using the feature, because it's not always that it's possble to do.
It's kind of like the reasoning behind not having idle tuners tune in the previous and next channel, to improve channel changing speeds. It could get strange for some people that sometimes it takes 4 sec to change a channel and sometimes it takes .5 sec.



Rather, to not miss shows that I did not record, but maybe would have found interesting, I would like to have a more advanceded rule-based scheduling engine. Kind of what ForTheRecord does (For The Record). You could then tell MP to record every show on every channel which contains the words "Lion" and "Safari" and "giraffe" in the description (if you're into those sort of nature programs).

I know this is not at all what you're asking, but it's another take on the "Damn, I missed a show I would have loved to watch"-problem.

But I'm sure there is alot of people who would really like you're idea. This is not a "bashing", just pointing out how I see it.

 

[tsamb.]

Fair enough point about consistency. A couple of responses:

Firstly, I think I could explain to my girlfriend simply enough that you can choose four of your favourite channels which whenever you switch to them, you can always rewind 30 minutes prior to where you start watching. I think she would even understand that sometimes it will only be 2 or 3 channels since a couple of other channels are being recorded. (I can see how that could be a stretch for technophobes where you start getting the glazed look.)

Secondly, in this country at least (where our DVB-T broadcast only has three muxes at present), it wouldn't be hard to put another tuner in my server and be able to timeshift every channel all the time. This is completely implausible for analogue broadcasts for the fact that it is unrealistic to have a free tuner available for every broadcast channel you can receive and the same goes for set top boxes with blasters. But with the advent of digital broadcasts, this could in fact be a reality.

Thirdly, why should we skimp on features that would be useful for us just because our significant others (or other technology-illiterate people) don't understand it. I am very technology literate but I still don't understand half of the quirky stuff that goes on in the MP GUI.

As for your alternative suggestion for an advanced rule-based scheduling system, that's nice. But perhaps we could merge the two ideas to cut down on system resources and clogging up our storage drives with tons of shows that we may never get around to watching. You could have a rule based scheduling system and put in as many keywords as you like: {'Sarah Silverman', 'John Stewart', 'Giraffe', 'Hospital', 'Short Film'} etc., the longer the list the better. And then rather than recording and storing every tagged show, the server will record tagged shows but only store them until halfway through the programming directly proceeding it. This way, you essentially have a timeshift back to the previous show if it was something you might have wanted to watch. Perhaps the option to store tagged shows for a day (or more) should be there, but I am all for less sorting and organising.

Either way, interesting discussion. Cheers.