Soft padding for EPG recordings (1 Viewer)

[divxmaster]

Hi,
I've been using Mediaportal for a very very long time, but have never come across a way to enable soft record padding.
By this I mean, if there is no program scheduled before one of your recordings it automatically adds a certain number of
minutes and also if there is nothing scheduled after one of your recordings it add minutes.

My S1 TiVo did this no problem.
Is there anything out there that does this? I've been looking for years.
If not, I will endeavour to write one that edits the database.

Cheers,
Divxmaster

 

[catavolt]

You can define pre/post recording times (in minutes)

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[divxmaster]

Well yes, but if I have say two programs set to record one after the other on different channels, and both have post record times,
it wont record the second one. Note this is dvbip.

 

[catavolt]

Note this is dvbip.

Wasn´t aware of that because you didn´t mentioned it before.

 

[divxmaster]

so, should soft padding be working for dvbip, or is it different from dbv-t/dvb-s?

 

[catavolt]

I think it´s different

 

[divxmaster]

ah ok,
do you think it can be fixed? I cant see any reason why it should be different really. More and more people are going to be getting
dvbip streams in the future.

Cheers,
Divxmaster

 

[Owlsroost]

I'm a little confused as to why scheduled dvbip recordings treat pre and post
record different from dbvt/s

Cheers,
Divxmaster

I don't think TV Server does treat the padding differently - it's the 'tuner', the nature of the streams and how it's handled that's different.

With DVB-T/C/S tuners, what it actually electrically 'tunes' is a multi-program/channel transport stream (a 'mux'). Then TV Server parses the packets for an individual TV channel out of it and writes that single-program 'sub-channel' stream to disk (timeshift buffer file or recording). If you have an overlapping recording/timeshift for the same channel it just creates a new 'sub-channel' stream, so there are multiple copies of the 'channel' running internally. Same thing happens if you watch/record a different TV channel on the same 'mux'. That way there is no need for 'soft padding'.

My understanding (but I don't know very much about how the DVB-IP stuff works in TV Server) is that each DVB-IP 'tuner' in TV Server can only handle one individual IP stream at a time, and it can't do the 'sub-channel copy' trick to create multiple copies of the same stream for recording/timeshifting.

Have you tried having multiple DVB-IP tuners (with the same channels mapped to them) in TV Server?

 

[divxmaster]

Hi Owlsroost, thanks for your reply.

Ok, now what I said in my first post in this thread is making more sense.

I have just done some testing, I turned off one of my DVBT tuners, so I only had one. Then I set a program to record at 9:00am, and added a pre-record of 3 minutes.
Then I went to a dvbt channel on a different mux and tried to set it to record a program ending at 9:00am. Nope, it wouldnt let me. This is the issue. The Tivo neatly gets around this type of problem (well actually its an add on - endpadplus), making all pre and post recording times soft. So in the above scenario it would record both programs, just skipping the 3 min pre record.

Btw, I already knew how mediaportal handles recording of channels on the same mux. (Basically record whatever and whenever you like if on same mux)

This issue I have with DVBIP, is I only have one dvbip source, but multiple channels available in that source. So only one dvbip tuner. I could add additional tuners but it wouldnt help, as only one channel can be active at one time. Basically the same as if you had only one dvbs/t tuner, and every channel was on a different mux.

As mentioned, I may be able to write an add on that scans the recording database every now and then and looks for conflicts caused only by pre/post record, and removes the pre post record. (I've only pulled data from MP databases twice, so know basically very little about it)

Cheers,
Divxmaster

 

[Owlsroost]

Does the TV server 'conflict checker' prompt you when you try and schedule two overlapping recordings? (I think it should, so if it doesn't that is potentially a bug)

A 'soft padding' option seems like a sensible idea (and might be useful in other situations). Since TV Server already has a 'conflict checker' maybe you could look at adding it to that part of TV Server code?