[GiGaBlue QUAD+ PLUS] AutoTimer Uniqueness

[birdman]

How are you setting your auto timers? Changed any image defaults?
Never had this issue.

The EPG description (sent by the broadcaster) is not a result of any autotimer setting by the user.

As has been noted before, some repeats of the same programme (re-broadcasts and/or different services) have different flags at the end, and sometimes different descriptions (e.g. SD == "Also in HD.", HD == "[HD]" at the end).
And different episodes of a programme may have the same (or very similar) description. e.g. successive episodes of "Football League Tonight" have a 99.5% similarity in their descriptions. So I won't get next-weeks timer set-up until this week's timer has been deleted, but for other programmes I have to keep the completed timer around for 7 days to stop it recording that programme a second time.

There are issues here, and several people are seeing them - the fact that you do not does not mean they they are not there.

 

[judge]

There are issues here, and several people are seeing them - the fact that you do not does not mean they they are not there.

Agree, but still cant reproduce them.
Can you point to a show on a satellite that has these issues, in simple to follow instructions that has issues?

 

[ccs]

I must admit that I don't really totally understand the problem either.

For example, I have an autotimer set to record the evening edition of Look North for the weather forecast.

I get all 7 recordings every week, the weekday descriptions are all the same, the weekend ones vary a bit.

All 7 future timers are currently ready and waiting, and 3 completed timers are still showing.

 

[leshay]

Agree, but still cant reproduce them.
Can you point to a show on a satellite that has these issues, in simple to follow instructions that has issues?

Hi
In my case, I had autotimers set up for Daily Politics and Newsnight. Both had the odd missing recording. I eventually deleted these autotimers and started my own app to let me set timers. During development I found the issue surrounding same episode with different description and different episodes with identical descriptions.

If the VIX software is using only title and description to set timers for an autotimer, then it must be falling foul of this problem too, and may account for my original issues.

 

[birdman]

If the VIX software is using only title and description to set timers for an autotimer, then it must be falling foul of this problem too, and may account for my original issues.

I'm working on that. In particular to discriminate by time period as well as description.

 

[birdman]

Can you point to a show on a satellite that has these issues, in simple to follow instructions that has issues?

No.
We don't have a satellite - we have Freeview. So the EPG is sent by the broadcaster(s) and out of our control.

But if you look back though this thread you will find examples where multiple broadcasts of the same episode have slightly different descriptions and different episodes of a programme have (near) identical descriptions.
So if you leave completed timers around to avoid duplicate timers in one case, you prevent new recordings being added for the other.

 

[Peterj]

Perhaps this has nothing to do with this issues.
A while back I by accident mixed 2 EPG providers. I am getting EPG from my cable provider and I also used Cross and Rytec to get the Rytec EPG.
I noticed that Program names sometimes where not the same, also on some channel the starting and ending time of the programs where different. I noticed the difference when my cable provider changed from EPG provider.
I can imagine that the autotimers have problems when you have 2 different program names in the EPG the same time.
There are several EPG providers for the same channels and the content can be different.

 

[birdman]

I must admit that I don't really totally understand the problem either.

For example, I have an autotimer set to record the evening edition of Look North for the weather forecast.

The problem is to also not get them recorded when they are repeated. To do that you need to turn on uniqueness checking. And then you run into problems with getting only one recording (instead of one a day) as the uniqueness check will say that they are all the same.
The issue is all about being able to record one and only one copy of programmes which are repeated whilst ensuring that you do get one copy of each distinct episode.

 

[birdman]

PS: I now have code to make the uniqueness check percentage variable, allow you to strip flags (and any other user-configurable text) from the end of a description before doing the check, and also to define time periods such that if two programmes have the same description but fall into different time periods then they will be treated as different.

The latter two sets of fixes are interdependent, as the current code uses lists (numbered indices) for different filters rather than using dicts (named keys). It wouldn't be difficult (and would simplify all of the code) to switch to dicts (I think).

With all that in place I think i can discriminate most things...except it appears that descriptions are being truncated to 200 characters, so any episode numbers (say) mentioned beyond there have no effect...