Preseason baseball starts tomorrow so I thought I'd pass along a few hints for recording with myth's current features while they are fresh in mind. This assumes North America with Data Direct but much of it would be applicable for other sports and other parts of the world.
Sports normally have league and/or sport name in the title and the names of the teams that are playing in the subtitle.
title: MLB Preseason Baseball subtitle: New York Mets at Washington Nationals programid: SP1647930000
This is a preseason game but when the season starts the titles will be "MLB Baseball". Each game has a different programid and if a game is replayed, it normally has the same programid but often is edited for time.
So, if you want to follow one team, the most efficient thing to do is to set a rule from Schedule Recordings->Search Words-> Advanced. Choose "<New Search>", Enter "MLB%Baseball" as the title phrase and "Giants", for example, as the subtitle phrase. The "%" wildcard is there to match both preseason and regular season games. You could even use just "MLB" but this might match things other than current games especially if you get channels like ESPN Classics.
Press "OK" to see if this finds any matches. In this case, there is a Giants game on ESPN for March 8th. If you hit Enter and set an All record rule on this game, you would actually be setting a rule for all "MLB Preseason Baseball". This probably isn't what you want to do. In order to set a Search rule instead, you need to press "M"enu to bring up the popup again, "M" or Tab to shift the focus to the buttons then click "Record". The options page will have "(Power Search)" at the end of the title to let you know that this is a search rule and not a regular rule for the show title.
For options, choose "Record at any time on any channel" of course. Under Scheduling Options, I like to set "End recording 59 minutes late" to cover some extra innings. The reason I choose 59 or 89 minutes is that either the game will end way before an extra hour or may go a couple hours longer, it isn't going to end in the 60th minute. By cutting it a minute short of the next hour, the file and db entries can be saved and out of the way for preroll seconds before the start of any show on the next hour. The :29 or :59 on the end time stands as a reminder that I added extra time and that I may want to change it depending on the shows that follow.
I normally leave the default duplicate rules but you may want to "Record new episodes only" epically if this helps with unwanted matches such as ESPN Classics.
For Storage Options, I use a profile that I've set up with a lower resolution but much higher bitrate. This is a good bang for the buck tradeoff for sports with a lot of motion. The high bitrate reduces compression artifacts and the lower res keeps the file size reasonable. However, I may still want to set an override to choose a higher res profile for a specific game.
This works great for one team but I used to find that I would set a bunch of rules for several NBA teams or College Basketball teams all with the same set of options. "Custom Record" now lets you set one rule that will match several team names within the same rule. To use this, go to Schedule Recordings->Custom Record. Enter a rule name like "Baseball" or the names of your teams or whatever. Press the down arrow then left arrow twice until it says "Multiple sports teams" then click the Add button. This shows an example for recording any of three NBA teams. You can then edit the title and list of teams to become something like this:
AND program.title LIKE "MLB%Baseball" AND program.subtitle REGEXP "(Giants|Marlins)"
You can add any number of names all separated by vertical bars. I could have used San Francisco and Florida instead as they would match the right teams also but Chicago may not be a good choice unless you really do want both Cubs and White Sox games.
Again, the "%" will match both preseason and regular season games. If you just want regular season games you could change it to:
AND program.title = "MLB Baseball" AND program.subtitle REGEXP "(Yankees|Red Sox)"
In this example it would record any regular season games for either the Yankees or Red Sox but I really don't care about either team unless they are playing each other. Here's a rule to record games when they meet:
AND program.title LIKE "MLB%" AND program.subtitle LIKE "%Yankees%" AND program.subtitle LIKE "%Red Sox%"
I can't use a simple wildcard string because the order is reversed depending on which team is home. This rule will be true when both team names are included somewhere in the subtitle.
These rules will let the scheduler find and make scheduling decisions about matching games. However, I often find that I want to make exceptions and that's okay. If the scheduler decided it would be better to record a replay to make room for other shows, I may look at it and decide that I'd rather click "Record anyway" for the live game and possibly miss another show.
I may see that things would fit if it started late and may be okay with missing the first inning. I may record a replay but then I know that I don't need the extra time. I might see that I could record even later without a conflict in case the game runs long or I may want to use a different recording profile for a game. All of these can be handled with overrides which allow you to set options for a single showing without affecting the normal options for the main rule. Press enter for the showing on the Scheduled Recordings page, click the "Add Override" button and choose "Record this showing with override options". From here you can set any options that you'd like which will only apply to this one specific game.
Okay, so maybe this was more about taking advantage of mythtv features than about watching baseball but I hope at least some
of you found something new that may be useful for you =).
-- bjm
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