On Wed, Dec 15, 2004 at 01:13:20PM -0800, Bruce Markey wrote: > to have something that you can watch to the end at your convenience, > press "R". I know of no possible behavior of a temporary buffer > that would make it a better option than to record.
I believe the "watching a very long event near live" qualifies. Recording the entire thing uses too much disk space to little purpose. Another example would be the 6 hour Olympic broadcasts, which in hi-def would take close to 50 gigabytes. You want to watch them that day, near live, because you don't want to hear on the radio about the results before you watch, and you want to be able to chat with people about the Olympics. However, this would be even better served by a concept of a "transitory recording," similar to that feature request in the bug database. In theory you should be able to have several of them (ie. imagine having two tuners, and recording the Olympics on CBC on one and NBC on another and switching back and forth as commercials happen.) The difference here is that the command to the system is "Dispose of the beginning of this recording as I watch it." Preserving perhaps 30 minutes of rewind, but otherwise, losing the start once it has been watched. If you had this, then not having a live buffer makes sense. You would also add to it the fact that these transitory recordings vanish in general quite quickly, to make space for actual requested recordings. Note that this is a useful thing even for real recordings. Sometimes I have recorded a long item like a 4 hour movie -- again almost 30GB in HD. I start watching it but I don't finish. It would be nice if the system could be told to reclaim the start up the movie, up to just a few minutes before my cursor. In fact, it could even do this automatically for most recordings, figuring you would normally -- though alas not always -- prefer to lose something you have already watched to something you need to record. Of course you would want it to be smart, if you only played a tiny amount at 1x speed, you would not be considered to have watched it. > >A common trick for sports and other live items on Tivo is as follows: > > An even better trick is to just record the darn thing ;-). > Watch something else when it starts and never fret if you've > fallen more than 30 minutes behind and don't worry that you > might forget and press the channel button while watching. > The right answer is just a click away but I think the real > issue is that old habits are hard to break. I'm good at breaking the habits, but when it comes to events like the Olympics, Superbowl, Academy Awards etc. I really do want to watch them just shortly behind real-time, and I should not have to pay a large disk space penalty to do so in an ideal setup. On Sept 11/01, when we spent the day watching the TV, the ring buffer is what you want. Also, such events are _not_ following the program guide schedule, so you would have to go in and set up a manual recording in this case. Lots of manual work. Admittedly, these sorts of things will hopefully stay rare!
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