Autotimers and series link info

[flyferrari]

Hi All. I'm new to VIX and this forum so please be gentle!

Like many I have come to my Xtrend 10000 from a venerable Topfield 5800 running a MyStuff GUI. I've had that for the best part of 15yrs and have only changed now to get HD and extra tuners. The Toppy was brilliant!

The fantastic thing about the Toppy/Mystuff combo was that it had virtually all of the features of AutoTimers but used the series link info in an intelligent way. MyStuff used "power search" to search the EPG and find all repeats of a series but would only record one version at a time when one of the tuners was free to record. With VIX, if you give Autotimers the flexibility to guarantee not missing the episode shown on an odd day or even pick up when the next series starts, you get multiple recordings of the same episode per week. This, apart from the ball ache of having to delete all the duplicates, also ties up the tuners so increases the possibility of timer clash. The Xtrend has the happy facility of having more tuners so this is rare but if Mystuff could do this a decade ago is there a good reason why VIX can't do the same today?

Other than this I love the VIX image and sorting this issue would be the icing on the cake.

Kevin

[adm]

Have you tried some of the other filters available in the autotimers

"Require description to be unique" .....
and when this is set to anything other than no you get
"Check for uniqueness in" .....

You can also restrict to one or couple of channels.

(Also ex-toppy/mystuff user with an Extrend 10K)

[flyferrari]

Thanks for the reply. I have looked at all the filters but I'm concerned that if I restrict the autotimer too much I'll end up missing episodes. The Toppy used to dart all over the time and channel options to record any given series. To be fair though, I've now got three tuners in the Xtrend and so far I've not had much in the way of conflicts. I imagine the bigger test will be when I let the missus loose on it (she's still using the Toppy!) and it tries to record all her shit as well as my stuff.

[DaMacFunkin]

Like ADM says you can choose to only record from certain channels and at certain times of the day, so for instance i could set the x factor to record only from ITV HD between 18:45 and 23:45, that way i wouldn't get any of the repeats from a saturday or sunday afternoon.

[ccs]

I've not missed any recordings since moving to an et10k (freeview only) from a toppy.
Even time changes/reshedules get picked up if the autotimer is run frequently enough (I use 25 minutes).

The question of series links has been asked plenty of times before.
I've never understood why the SL data is being ignored when it surely can't be too difficult to add this extra attribute to a programme's details.
Maybe there is a copyright issue?

[EMJB]

I've never understood why the SL data is being ignored when it surely can't be too difficult to add this extra attribute to a programme's details.
Maybe there is a copyright issue?

Is the series-linking a UK-only feature?

EMJB

[flyferrari]

That's the funny thing. MyStuff on the Toppy was written, I believe, by a German (clearly a very talented bloke). However altruistic he is, I can't see him coding software that could only be used to its fullest performance in a country that wasn't where he lives! As for copywriting, I can't see that either as the series link info is broadcast on Freeview where the whole point is "free".

Still holding out hope for one of the talented VIX team picking up this batton and running with it!

[ccs]

The author of MyStuff lives in Nottingham, and I believe that "series link" was copyrighted by sky many years ago, but I might well be wrong with that one.

[Joe_90]

Perhaps the term "series link" has some level of copyright protection, but the mechanism used for linking programme and series information is embedded in the DVB data stream. It's called the Content Reference IDentifier or CRID. There are CRIDs for identifying the programme and the series it belongs to. In some cases the content of the CRID is just a simple string of digits but the standard allows for complex content such as URLs. In a simple case Coronation Street might have a series CRID of "ABCDE" which will remain unchanged for the normal Mon-Fri showings. Overnight repeats would have a different series CRID as would the weekend omnibus editions. Each episode would have a programme CRID - say "99123", "99124", "99125" etc. which would identify that specific episode and would be the same for that episode in repeat showings. A combination of series and programme CRIDs would be unique and allow the autotimer to follow and record each episode without also recording repeats. This is how my Humax Freesat box works and I would assume SKY boxes are similar. Further extensions of the CRID allow for linking to similar/related programmes.

I would imagine the issue with using CRIDs in ViX or any other E2 image is that the construction of the CRID content is not standardised. I'm sure the developers have looked at this before but it's probably worth another look.

[flyferrari]

Sometimes I amaze myself by how far wrong I can be! Thanks for the correction CCS.....I have no idea where I got the idea BobDS/Mystuff was German. Oh well.

Thanks Fat-Tony for your, clearly well informed, input. As a beta tester, does this mean you can raise the profile of this facility with the VIX team?

[Joe_90]

Will do. It may have been discussed before.

[EMJB]

To get the best out of the CRID data, I suspect a fairly fundamental change would be needed to the AutoTimer logic, namely to save a list of episodes recorded (or set for recording) for each autotimer rather than searching the EPG and recordings. Such a change could usefully be made with the present search logic, but the storing the whole description rather than just the CRID episode might be a pain.

EMJB

[Joe_90]

I think you're probably right that to "shoehorn" it into Autotimers might be too fundamental a change. If CRID episode and series following was to be implemented it would need a table of programmes to be held, together with their scheduled start times. Specific episodes which were recorded successfully could be "ticked off" and those missed for whatever reason could be picked out of repeats. My Humax Foxsat used to do that pretty well. About the only thing that threw it off was when BBC moved particular episodes of Formula 1 from BBC1 to BBC2 with limited notice...

[EMJB]

I think you're probably right that to "shoehorn" it into Autotimers might be too fundamental a change. If CRID episode and series following was to be implemented it would need a table of programmes to be held, together with their scheduled start times. Specific episodes which were recorded successfully could be "ticked off" and those missed for whatever reason could be picked out of repeats. My Humax Foxsat used to do that pretty well. About the only thing that threw it off was when BBC moved particular episodes of Formula 1 from BBC1 to BBC2 with limited notice...

But don't let this stop anyone amending enigma to make the data available to a new (or extended AutoTimer) plug-in!! In the case of the Toppy the firmware was patched to put the CRID data at the end of the description, avoiding the need for data structure changes and that would seem a reasonable approach here too. Once the data is available the plug-in can follow, and as a half-way house I suspect AutoTimer could be amended fairly easily to compare the just the CRID info rather than whole description to identify repeats among other timers and among recordings .

EMJB

[birdman]

I suspect AutoTimer could be amended fairly easily to compare the just the CRID info rather than whole description to identify repeats among other timers and among recordings .

Possibly not, as Vix doesn't store a list of what has been recorded. When AutoTimers are set to check against any previous recording they actually scan the ts.meta file of all existing recordings (including those in .Trash, IIRC). If you were doing a series link you'd probably want to know what has been recorded in the last <n> months, even if you've now deleted it (as was done on the Toppy). A sqlite database, perhaps...