Brad Templeton wrote:
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.
Brad, we really should take up a collection to buy you another
disk ;-). The trade off between missing part or all of today's
game verses hanging on to something left unwatched for several
months for one more day just in case it might be watched tomorrow
before it inevitably expires is not a compelling case.
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.
Again this is space management. In the long run, a DVR ought to
have at least a 40 to 60 capacity to be effective. But given that
a 6 hour segment may be an issue, you could record one or two hour
sections and delete them as you finish. You could also keep the
sections that you may want to see again and you would still have
them to watch tomorrow if you fell asleep on the sofa.
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.)
I can no longer imagine being this constrained. Last summer I
was often recording three and sometimes four channels during
Olympic coverage. Because of the time difference and delayed
broadcasts, they were on around the clock. I couldn't have stayed
up all night and all day every day for two weeks straight to
catch everything before it rolled out of a temp buffer. While
it is obvious to think that capacity would be an issue, as
you've mentioned, you need to keep up and I don't believe I
ever had more than maybe 15 hours of unwatched Olympics at
any time.
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.
Just wondering, what brand of disk might be on your Christmas
wish list?
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.
Right, but I fail to see why the system should have to impose
policy on me in this way. For example, I record a lot of sports.
These are long and I almost always (but not always!) watch them
on the same day so these are this kind of transitory recordings.
I may record movies that I might not watch for weeks or months
and so I'm may be reluctant to use a high bitrate and hold a lot
of disk space for a long time. However, no problem using high
res for something that I'll delete by days end. Now, I'm going
to delete it when I'm done. Why should the system be deleting
any part of this without my consent? Given the risk of missing
part of today's game vs. expiring the oldest neglected show, I
want it to expire the leftover and only when there really is
a disk short fall. In the bigger picture, I want to have enough
capacity that this is never an issue. I'm rarely above 60% of
my capacity and if did get to a point where I couldn't stay
below 90%, I'd be planning for expansion.
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.
An ideal setup has dozens, if not hundreds of hours of capacity.
If a single 3-6 hour recording that will be deleted the same day
is an issue, then the system is hardly ideal.
Things like The Superbowl or Academy Awards are the kinds of things
that I watch while they record then go back and re-watch highlights
later or the next day. Maybe something happened at halftime that
merits further examination or the opening performance at an awards
show is worth seeing again. A system that would delete these for
me as it goes would not be ideal.
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.
Huh? You can hit record for whatever is in the listing for CNN.
It doesn't matter that the titles don't match the breaking news
coverage. I absolutely mark hours and hours of CNN programming
for record when there is breaking news. In fact. during the last
couple wars, I literally (as opposed to figuratively rather than
the flippant way "literally" is used as an exaggeration these days)
would record CNN 24 hours a day. Every few hours I would fast
forward through and catch any new development reported as they
happened, catch entire press conferences and briefings that were
in the middle of the night our time, etc. I'd set these to low
res, low priority and they'd innocuously take up a higher numbered
tuner while my lower tuners continued with their normal fare.
A couple times per day I'd have to mark the next 12-24 hour for
record. However, now it would be easy to set a Custom Record for
'AND channel.callsign = "CNN"', mark it for no duplicate matching,
low res, low priority, and you'd be all set to record everything
on CNN until you removed the rule.
-- bjm
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