Thoughts on AutoTimers - discuss...

[steveharman]

A while back I was the proud owner of a Topfield terrestrial receiver before getting a GigaBlue Quad. The Topfield was a nice box and it had the concept of repeat-AutoTimers in a similar way to OpenVIX - but in my humble opinion did it somewhat better.

When one setup an AutoTimer for say "Master Chef" on the Topfiled one could specify that it recorded Master Chef when it found it broadcast on "Any channel", "Any channel except +1" or nominate a specific channel; BBC2. Then whenever the phrase "Master Chef" was found in the EPG on Any Channel, or BBC2 etc. a recording would take place. As different from the VIX AutoTimer where a recording for "Master Chef" is specified between say 20:00 and 21:00.

Why was the Topfield approach better? Well say for example you're keen on Master Chef the series - the BBC also broadcasts other Master Chef related shows "Master Chef - a look back at previous winners", "Master Chef Recipes" etc etc. The Topfield approach would also grab those shows too which you may not have known about. Obviously this meant more recordings, but disc is cheap and it only takes a few seconds to delete unwanted shows.

Another example would be that of Sky One last week when they began a new series of "24". We set an AutoTimer on our VIX based GigaBlue to record the show, told it to repeat every week and thought that would be it. Sky however decided to run the first two episodes back to back on the first night. Because our AutoTimer was only looking to record the show between specific times we missed out on episode 2 which was shown straight after episode 1. If the AutoTimer had been looking in the EPG to match the string "24" then hey presto it would have grabbed the first and second shows without us having to think about it.

The Topfield way of doing things also proved useful for catching future series of shows you didn't know where starting. Back to the Master Chef example, we once setup a timer for Master Chef to grab one series and later in the year the box began recording the new series that we didn't even know was due to start, without us having to lift a finger.

Just my 2p and apologies if it's in the wrong forum.

Cheers,

Steve

[judge]

Ho are you adding the auto-timers?
When in EPG, if you press blue button for Add AutoTimer, you'll get a screen where you can disable timespan & other options.

Also have a look at the AutoTimers screen & press menu to see what other options you have.

[Larry-G]

Most people dont want to grab every single possible showing of a tv show, that said auto timers is very versatile and can be setup to do pretty much what you want.

[Stanman]

You can do exact same on AT.

When you press blue button and have the import at screen there are 5 options. If you unpick the last 4 it will record anything with master chef in title on any channel.

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