Me TV

Scheduled recordings often begin one hour or half hour before they are programemd to.

Asked by Markov Chaney

Hi there. When I set Me-TV to record a program starting at 9am, it will usually start it at 8:30, and miss the bulk of what I wanted to record. It's not totally consistent though: yesterday it started properly at 9:00, but today it actually started recording at 8:00. I took a look at me-tv.log, and it confirms that recording did start at 8:00, so it's not the TV station (ABC1) stuffing up their schedule. I'm thinking the time broadcast by the digital signal is what's causing it, since it's also consistently wrong on another STB at home, but is it the time reported by the EPG (rather than the local time from the PC clock) that triggers the recording to start? If so, maybe you could add an option to use the PC clock for scheduled recordings, as a workaround. I've double-checked my time zone setting (Adelaide, Au CST) in both Ubuntu and ~/.met-tv/channels-conf, and they are fine.
If you've got this far, thanks for reading. I'm guessing not many people have seen this problem, since it's probably limited to the ABC in CST, and even then only during certain programmes (scheduled recording in the evening has been ok for me).
Other stuff you might need:
Dist: Ubuntu 8.04
Version: Me-TV 0.5.30

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Markov Chaney
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Michael Lamothe (lamothe-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#1

Hi Markov,

I've heard of this once before from a guy in Helsinki but never from here in Australia. Me TV *does* use the PC time to determine when to record. The timing routines are not perfect in 0.5 because of inexperience in programming time routines.

What are the before/after recording times set to in the preferences?

Thanks,

Michael

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Markov Chaney (keno888) said : 		#2

Well, that blows my theory right out of the water.
The before and after times are both set to 7 minutes. I actually set the total duration for today's attempt to around 72 minutes in an effort to adjust for the usual half hour difference, but still only managed to get the first few minutes of what I wanted.
I guess I could set before/after to something like 30 minutes each, but the file sizes are already getting a bit big for the machine I'm running it on.

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Markov Chaney (keno888) said : 		#3

Update:
Had the same program in the schedule today, set to start recording at 9:00am, went in to check it at about 8:40 and it had already been recording since 8:00am again. Stopped the recording, deleted the item in the schedule, and added it again, and recording began immediately: in other words it thought it was already 9:00. Then it stopped recording at 9:12 (programmed to record for 72 minutes, so from 9:00 until 10:12).

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Markov Chaney (keno888) said : 		#4

Yet more info from further testing:
Current time 8:40, channel ABC1
Schedule once-off recording for 9:02 for 42 minutes -> works fine
Schedule once-off recording as above, but increase duration to 90 minute -> recording starts early
Schedule everyday minus weekend for same -> recording starts early
Increase after-time in Preferences to 30 minutes then schedule everyday minus weekend for 9:02 for 72 minutes -> recording starts early

It's like any extra time is being added to the beginning, instead of the end.

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Michael Lamothe (lamothe-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#5

Hi Markov,

Please don't take my silence as a sign that no one is listening. I am, I just have no idea what the issue is ... yet. It doesn't make sense. I would steer-clear of the daily and weekly recordings for testing, they are definitely broken.

Scheduled recordings will be available in 0.6 very shortly and we might start troubleshooting there. In the meantime, please keep posting any another facts that you find, we might strike gold.

Thanks,

Michael

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Markov Chaney (keno888) said : 		#6

No worries, at least there's a known workaround, and the problem is repeatable now. If I knew any C (and it wasn't 10 years since I'd done any programming at all) I'd take a look at the source myself.

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Michael Lamothe (lamothe-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#7

https://bugs.launchpad.net/me-tv/+bug/251064

Is the same as yours? If so, we'll close this and continue there.

Revision history for this message
Markov Chaney (keno888) said : 		#8

Sounds a lot like it, based on the info given. I'm happy to close this and work from the bug report.