Keith Irwin wrote:
On Sep 30, 2005, at 3:22 AM, Rudy Zijlstra wrote:
Face up to it. Soft scheduling will still result in unexpected
behaviour. Spend 50bucks to get an extra tuner and spare yourself
the disappointment.
Regards,
Rudy
It's not that simple for all of us. I have one tuner for ATSC
(primarily high definition) digital programming and another for
analog TV programming off of cable. Both sometimes have back to back
recordings. So I'd need two more tuners. I can't fit two more
tuners into my box. The PCI slots are too tightly spaced to put
tuner cards with large "tin can" tuners on them into adjacent slots.
As such, I would need to buy another computer and two tuners.
Realistically, we're talking about a minimum of $450 (basic computer
= $300, ATSC tuner = $100, NTSC tuner = $50). That's significantly
outside my budget.
As a user, I would just like to say that having a few minutes of soft
time is very useful to me. Shows on several networks I watch are
often literally back to back. For instance, That Seventies Show has
jokes during the credit roll. On FX the next show starts five
seconds later. The network's clock is not synchronized with mine to
that kind of margin of error. In fact, it's rare that it's
synchronized to within 30 seconds. I want to be able to capture the
whole show. But I would rather give up a few seconds of the end of a
show than be unable to record a show due to conflicts. Setting
preroll and postroll to a few minutes does this perfectly. If the
official version of MythTV goes to a 30-second limit on preroll and
postroll, I will start patching my own version to avoid this limit.
With soft time, unexpected behavior can occur, yes, but most of the
time it "does the right thing" without my having to tell it what to
do and that's invaluable. Those of you who don't like soft time, -
don't use it-. Don't tell the rest of us that we should be happy
with hard time. If we wanted hard time, we could set it. What the
argument against better soft time support (options such as using a
second tuner rather than killing the preroll) comes down to is "I
don't like soft time, so you shouldn't either." I'm glad for those
of you who can set your preroll and postrolls to a few seconds and
not have problems, but I'll miss beginnings and endings if I do
that. But excuse me if I don't cry for the fact that I'm abusing a
feature. If a significant portion of users are abusing a feature,
perhaps it's time for the feature to change to accommodate that usage.
Keith Irwin
The reason i do not like the unexpected behaviour of soft time support,
is that it significantly lowers F(amily)AF. There simply is no way to
explain the resulting behaviour to them... And considering the serious
extra time that is needed to solve the slippage here, soft timing simply
is not resulting in predictable behaviour. Yes i understand your budget
problem. I've gone to the length of using 3 back-ends, each with 2
tuners to fully solve the schedule conflicts (4 analog tuners, 2 SAT
tuners).
Rudy
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