Oh no!

I've just received the Humax, have played with it all evening and quite like it so far.
Have set up all my exisiting schedules on it, i.e. loads of Cbeebies stuff, lots of other progs..

Set up various other preferences..

then I went looking for a "Auto Delete" feature....

Argg, I think there isn't one! Can't believe it.
I might have to take it back!

Tell me I'm wrong and there is a way for it to automatically delete old programs when disk is near full to make way for new programs?

I ended up buying the Humax, but had considered Vestel for sometime - Humax is supposed to be (and probably is in most ways) the superior machine, but Vestel has auto delete feature.

I expect if you've not got used to it, i.e. your Humax is your 1st PVR you wonder what I'm fussing about...

But I record a lot of programs that I _may_ be interested in, sometimes I watch all/most of them, sometimes I don't.
I do like the prospect of wading through lots of programs per day/per week manually deleting them all!
Even worse prospect is that I forget to make space _manually_ and a new program airs and the Humax fails to record it 'cos disk full!

Can't believe feature not there, without it programs that are v. old have priority over new programs! Perhaps some people would be happy with that - there should be an option at least - and ideally you should be able to mark programs _not_ to be auto deleted by feautre too.

I don't know if I can live with Humax without this feature. I may have to return then and buy a Toppy or Vestel clone

UNLESS I've missed something??

No auto delete I'm afraid.

Why don't you take it back as you said and get another box and that way you will be happy.

I would prefer no auto delete myself, I can't imagine a program had been deleted that I wanted to watch just because I recorded something to show the mrs or worse still she had recorded something for the kids, that would do my head in.

It's fine the way it is!

All you need to do is delete your old programs, it's not time consuming or difficult, no wading involved as you select all the older programs and press a magic button called 'DELETE'

No take your Humax back and leave us alone

Aghhhh. I just bought the latest VHS videorecorder. It's supposed to be the best available, JVC NTSC SVHS videoplus+ PDC Autotune FollowTV.
Well I recorded some programmes onto tape, set some timers, and do you believe it when I went to watch the recordings it had failed to execute the timers because the tape was full up. I at least expected it would rewind the tape and record over the old shows.

No marmite1 I'm with CK* on this one. If you set some timer events, you are responsible for making sure there is space available. Only you can scan through the recordings and decide which are the least important to you, and they may just as easily be recent recordings as old ones.

I agree with the responders. You can sort the list in date order so it's dead easy to delete old ones you don't want. You must have a lot recorded if you fill up your disc; I've never got anywhere near to filling up and I record quite a lot every week. But when I've watched them I delete them immediately.

Don't forget I said, ideally there should be a way to mark programs _not_ to be deleted automatically.

I also said option

And sure, I can understand that people might prefer to give preference to programs that are 6 weeks old, rather than upcoming episodes programs.
Personally though I'd be gutted if I'd come back off a 2 week holiday to find it had kept all those programs from 6 weeks ago, but failed to record the last 2 weeks worth of schedules! arrgg. - Without auto deleting of course, before I went away I should make damn sure I calculate how much GB's are going to be recorded whilst I'm away and delete the corresponding amount of programs before I go away.

To me that's a complete hassle and a pity to delete in advance like that too, as plans can change, other family members for example might have viewed some of this material if available, if auto delete would take care of things.

I said if _watched_, personally I'd STILL prefer it to delete 6 week old programs I'd failed to watch rather than miss recording new ones.
But as I've said, those who'd prefer the other way round it should be an option.

All you need to do is delete your old programs, it's not time consuming or difficult, no wading involved as you select all the older programs and press a magic button called 'DELETE'


I hope you aren't taking personally, just because you are an existing Humax owner, the Humax is clearly a good machine - I'm just frankly surprised it doesn't have this feauture, as mine does and my media center and others on market - I assumed (silly me not to check) that Humax would also.



Come on, that's hadly a good analogy, funny, but you cannot compare a linear system with a maximum on it 8hrs, no way to amalgamate 'freed' space to a device with >80hrs of space and ability to use all space available, i.e. random access.

IF you imagine a theoretical VHS which did have have an 80hr tape (and I think this as best thought of as N weeks worth of recording) - then yes if such a theoretical beast existed and no digital devices, then YES I would like it to auto rewring an overwrite - it's silly example though, as VCR's are so impracticle compared to DTR's in the first place.


Problem is, that way, you have to continously decide which is important, we KNOW already for example Neighbours if old can be deleted, we KNOW all the cbeebies stuff we record each week, perhaps 10hrs a week, can be deleted if old.
A LOT of stuff (certainly if weeks old) is lower priority than upcoming shows.


DSman, you've never got near to filling up, because as you say, you delete when you watch things.

Well, as I've said, I have plenty of stuff that isn't watched, e.g. lots of cbeebies stuff that may be watched - but there is too much, but it gives children the choice of any of the favourite programs they want, when wanted always.

Also, I don't want to watch a program after viewing, I _could_ plenty of times, but it is much more preferrable to watch when I want and leave there, perhaps as is often the case because wife watching when[if] she has more time or I want to show someone, etc.

I really do think this is a shame that it's not there.

You get used to what you have, I had a big debate on another thread about the pro's of live buffering/rewind - some others couldn't see the point, as Humax onwers you probably do see the point.
If you haven't used a system where you don't _have_ to delete yourself and are used to deleting your programs on a regular basis or as DSMan does after watching every program, then its a different paradigm and an alien one.

All I can say if that is the case, is that if you've used it, it has means to keep programs you don't want it to auto delete and/or a means to turn it off completely should you choose to, it's a very nice feature.

marmite1, what I think you really need is a buttler/personal slave that can do all the deleting for you as it seems alot of effort for you to select what recordings you no longer want to keep and press delete.

What has the world come to with all the simple things in life being made out to be complicated..

At the moment when the disk is full the PVR prioritise old recordings over new ones.

Which doesn't make sense. Old recordings are more likely to have been watched, of if not are less likely to be watched in the future, than new ones that haven't had a chance to be watched yet. It's like throwing away new milk you just brought from the shop as your fridge is full rather than binning the pugent, sour, old milk. There is already a system to protect recordings you want to keep, so that's not an issue. Presumably if you don't want this feature then you are happy tidying up the box as you go along, which is fine, but means any change like this won't affect you, so why do you care?

If you run out of space it makes far more sense to store new recordings so you have a chance to watch them than keep old recordings, that you've already had a chance to watch and/or protect. The best solution would be to add a protect option to reservations that is passed onto recordings (so you can't delete either without the password, and neither will be auto-deleted), make the yellow button work on the play list (either to edit as in the recording menu, or just protect it) and have an option (that probably ought to be on by default as it makes more sense) to delete the oldest (unprotected) recording when the disk is full rather than stop the current recording.

That way you'd save time as you wouldn't have to clear up the disk, just protect what you want to keep. You wouldn't have the case where someone deletes something straight after watching to keep the disk clear it then finds out they weren't the only one who wanted to watch it. And you wouldn't have the case where nothing is recorded because you misjudged how much you needed to delete or forget about it for a while.

Once a week or so clearing out recordings is simple. As is checking the guide once a week for this weeks times for series you want to record. As is adding a few minutes to a recording so you don't miss the start and the end.

But not having to do that as the software do rutine simple tasks for you (like auto-padding, series record and auto-delete) is simpler not more complicated.

Some sanity at last

I've said it should be an option, so those who really do prefer to keep their very old recording at the expense of the latest shows, they could turn off, but I'm pretty sure most people would prefer if given a direct choice to keep latest vs old.

However as The1andonly has said, people who like to housekeep themselves can still do so!


Who said complicated? No-one, that's not the point.

You're more on track with buttler/personal slave thought - stick to that.
Yes - I want a personal buttler! I want my PVR to handle these things for me. The1andonly made the point very well, there are _lots_ of things that are simple to do, that I'm sure we are all glad the PVR does.

BUT - it's not just about the convenience factor - I tried to make the point before, it's also the extra functionality you get from this feature.
On my PVR - I _never_ delete. I _always_ have >=1 episode from each of 7 of my child's favourite Cbeebies programs and a stack of other interesting programs I am interested in to varying degrees - we never watch them all. The disk is permanently full of programs we want to watch (the latest ones)

If _I_ had to housekeep, I'd have to keep my box a lot emptier than I'd want to, e.g. I'd have to keep roughly 10hrs free all the time - 'cos I'd never know without calculating daily/weekly, how much scheduled material is coming up.

I _could_ live without this handy facility and I'd get used to doing my own HD housekeeping, I certainly would _never_ run the risk of my HD being full and missing the latest programs!

It's a shame - I like the Humax in other respects, but.. well Toppy definetely get my vote now and I may look at the latest Vestel's too if I can. The Vestel's certainly have their own problems and limitations, e.g. no live buffer. But I _think_ I'd prefer auto delete than live buffering to be honest.

I already 'sold' the idea of auto delete to my mother, who this humax _was_ destined for (as a xmas present) - she's 80 and really liked the idea of being able to record what she liked and never having to worry about space / never having to delete.. oh well.

It wasn't meant to sound that way, but didnt get chance to edit.
What I was trying to get at was with all these things that are designed to make our lives easier like your Auto delete feature, when these things are gone or not working when youve used them before, people get flustered and cannot cope without it.
ie: The power button on the tv remote will not turn the tv on, panic sets in and nobody knows what to do and cannot cope with getting off their bums and pressing the button on the tv.

marmite1, help!, my curiosity wants to know why you have these underscores in your posts!

I happen to agree with Marmite. I've been used to autodelete on my Tivo and never ever lost a program due to the disk being full. I lost several programs due to this in the first 6 months I had a Humax.

Ah ok, well yes in that sense you're right, we are all terribly reliant on technological conveniences already, a lot of them doing minor things that we could get off our butt and do ourselves, but I'm not going to throw my remote away, my toaster/kettle to stretch the analogy. All little personal butlers in their own way!

I still claim the auto delete gives you something above and beyond a hassle free facility to delete, IOW it's not just something you could get by doing manually. What you get from this feature is a new paradigm for using your PVR.
i.e. Record 20+hrs a week if you want - watch all of it, some of it, none of it - go away for any period of time at any time - and be assured that when you come back you will at the very least have the last e.g. 80hrs of schedules.
As I say, ideally in addition, you'd be able to define priorities about what to keep too, like my media centre does. It doesn't have an option to delete new recording before they've started prioritization funnily enough


sorry, just an IM habit to emphasis words, where no bold/italics available.

I'd be interested how you now manage your HD space (never had to worry about it before) - have you got used to it now? You say you lost progs in 1st 6 months, by that I assume you mean you don't anymore - what's your policy - ensure you make space every week or so, or..?

2 things changed -

1. I was only using the Humax as backup to my Tivo until quite recently, so I used to just let it record on a regular basis a number of our popular programs, but never actually watched them on the Humax so they used to just build up

2. The ability to delete programs from the playlist revolutionised it for me. I now delete stuff every time I look at the playlist.

I'm with Marmite1 too..... The missus often drags me (screaming and kicking, of course) to some random place in the world for 3ish weeks-- with all the crap we like to record it'd be nice to know I dont have to think about getting rid of old programs and "guessing" there is enough space to record everything.

Will it ever appear as a feature in the hummy? I guess probably not.... But its still a great piece of kit so I wont be trading it in!!!

It seems to me that the OP wants the Hummy to violate a fundamental rule of computery: never ever make irreparable changes to stored information without first confirming with the user.

Personally, I would be furious if it deleted a treasured recording without first asking my permission. In fact, I would claim that would make it unfit for purpose. But on the other hand, if it simply failed to record I would be equally annoyed.

I’ve never come near the limit on my 9200, so am not sure what actually happens, but surely the obvious answer is for it to alert the user at the time of scheduling, or at any later time if ad hoc recordings are made, that the disc would overfill if the settings were left. It’s not foolproof, of course: repeats are potentially infinite, but you could take a month’s schedule or something.

My VCR used to do that, and my HDD DVD recorder does it.

If the OP insists, offer an ‘always delete the oldest’ override option in the setup menu.

The point the OP is making, is that it is confirmed by default, and that the Humax already has the ability to protect (lock) valuable recordings (currently from accidental manual deletion, but the principle is the same).

But you could then go on to ask, what should happen when the HDD is full of locked or unwatched recordings, what does it then decide to delete to make way for new events.
And if an unprotected programme of thirty minutes is available for deletion, should it delete that and attempt to record a one-hour event in it's place. This will result in a complete deleted programme , replaced by in my view a useless half-hour of video with the programme conclusion missing...

Projecting the amount of space available is not quite as easy on the Humax and similar recorders, because the bit rates vary massively from less than 1Gb/hour on some channels to over 2Gb/hour on others.

On a VCR, there are mechanisms for working out how much tape is left, and you know for any recording how much will be taken up, based on running time and tape speed. On a DVD recorder, you have a few encoding settings, and those are based on a fixed amount of information per hour.

I'd say that the older recordings that have been watched are much more likely to be things you've deliberately kept for repeat viewing?

I think the O.P. has a point, the degners of the system haven't thought of people who'd like to operate the system in that particular way. For me I'd raher delete the programs I don't want than have to mark the ones I want to keep.

What is missing is a quicker way to find out how much space you've got left - I'd like to see a &age disk full on the EPG so I'd know when it's running close to the wire.

I agree, some disc statistics on the PlayList would be great. I can't see this being very difficult to do; yet why isn't it there already

Agreed, lets all put this on our list of the next features we want on the hummy

What happens is that as the disc is about to fill up there is an on-screen warning to the effect that the recording is about to stop due to lack of space. This has happened to me a couple of times while I've been watching another channel and I've hastily deleted a few things and it's carried on hapilly.

Obviously, if you're not aware of this message, it just stops when it can't record any more.

Personally, I check the HDD space and have a clear-out about once a week. I try to leave about 25% free and rarely have any problems.

(I've now installed a permanent USB cable between Humax and Mac and can archive the occasional programme that I really want to keep.

Then protect it, as given the ease of deleting, and other users possibly not realising you want it kept, you probably should do anyway.

With new recordings, you haven't had the chance to watch or protect them, so it makes more sense to keep that information rather than old information that a user hasn't bothered to protect.

I don't think anyone could object to this being an option, and making the not unreasonable assumption that protected recordings are under no circumstances deleted (if this wasn't in case it would be stupid for anyone to leave enabled), making it a default should be acceptable to all, and probably sensible for most. Adding an option to protect recordings when reserving them would probably make it a sensible option for all.

Because PVRs are likely to fill up the hard drive when users are away, can't prompt at the time of reservation, can wait to prompt, and also is not for the purpose of archiving (which is a minor breach of copyright). the situation is fundamentally different from any normal computing situation, and so that "fundamental rule" doesn't really hold.

I'll have to look in my book of "Fundamental rules of computery" , I've never heard such a declaration before about "computery" in my 20 years in software engineering.

When TIVO invented the PVR - they invented a new paradigm, completely alien to the video(or DVD recorder) paradigm.

The only thing that is relevant here, is what goals should the PVR design fulfil for the end user.
Given storage is limited, this space must be managed.

We're discussing two schemes here:

1) User manages space. *1
+ User ensures there is N GB's free / N minutes free, to fulfil the upcoming schedule list. User decides how often to do this, per program, per day, per week etc.
+ By definition all programs are "important" (kept indefinetely)
+ If user fails to make space available for the scheduled item, system ignores schedule in order to keep all existing recordings.
2) System manages space. *2
+ User has option to manage space themselves regularly [as with scheme 1], in so doing ensures all existing programs are kept
+ Priorities are given to recorded material (which have no meaning until storage is full)
+ If insufficient storage is available for a new scheduled item, system will attempt to delete >=1 program with a lower and lowest priority to allow new scheduled item to record.
NB: You could define that every program recorded was 'kept for ever', in which case the system would not find anything it could delete and would fail to record new programs.
Thereby simulating scheme 1.
+ By default priorities will result in FIFO policy, oldest programs out, new programs in.

*1 - System that implement this policy
HUMAX 9200T
(I'm sure there othes I just don't know of them)
*2 - System that implement to varying degrees, I'll put them in order of sensible implementation/flexibility [subjective of course]
Tivo
MediaPortal
Sky+
Topfiled 5800 with TAPS
all Vestel clones



- As you can see, scheme 2 is a superset of scheme 1 ( you can do ensure scheme 1 behaviour in scheme 2 if you so desire )
- Both schemes are the same in practice, if you decide and successfully manage your disk space yourself.

The crux is what happens is if your storage is full, IOW if you have not managed your HD space.
This is obviously not a viable option in the medium/long term for scheme 1.

Scheme 2, you can decide to let the system manage your storage, according to your priority scheme.




You mitigate both scenarios, by managing your own storage, scheme 2 does not preclude you from doing this.
It merely gives the option to avoid doing so.
And besides, you should in scheme 2, be able to mark your precious recording as high priority and the system will never delete them.
I would be really annoyed if it deleted my precious recording too, but I mark my precious reecordings as precious when I schedule them, or after, I reckon in worst case scenario I have 5 weeks to decide (based on 16hrs a week at 2GB per hr bitrate).

You're right in theory I could forget to premark a program as important and then also forget in the next 5 weeks to mark it, then it could get deleted in place of some unimportant show. That is not likely I would argue. AND consider a scheme 1 scenario for a moment, your favourite series and final unmissable episode airs tonight, you’ve been away all week and the disk has been filling up, there’s plenty of stuff you’d gladly delete, but you haven’t done your housekeeping, oh dear that unmissable episode has just been missed, shortly followed by unmissable documentary, a crap show here and there, and some other must sees.

Both of those scenarios are undesirable, but IMHO the 2nd is much worse and more likely (Don’t forget this is irrelevant in both schemes if you do regular housekeeping and easily avoided if scheme 2 by marking as important at anytime.



I agree – that would be an improvement, but in practice I suspect very difficult or impossible to implement that way, because depends on bitrates of future programs, depends on number of episodes on a series link that may not be known, depends on overruns, etc. etc.
Still it could give a clue, but I prefer scheme 1 adopted by many other manufacturer (*2)



Well exactly, I've said multiple times, make it optional.


Absolutely, it’s difficult to see how anyone could argue with this feature being present.
I hope Humax are listening

marmite1: thanks for the detailed reply . In the spirit of informed (?) debate, it deserves a response:

Well, I have 20 years on you. Perhaps it was written and forgotten before your time?


I take your point; obviously Scheme 1 is a subset of 2, assuming the appropriate useful options are made available.

True, but I’m proposing a third:[LIST][*]By default, no programme is deleted without the User’s permission[*]When the recording schedule changes, the system compares the estimated space required in the schedule with the available HDD capacity [*see below]. Schedule change includes starting a live recording (which automatically terminates at the end of the programme, so you know how much it will require).[*]If the capacity would be exceeded, trigger an alert and offer the user the option to accept or reject the the schedule. If accept, revert to Scheme 2 (the User cannot say then that he hasn’t been warned).[*]When recording takes place, Scheme 2 applies by default (but only because the User has accepted the consequences as above).[/LIST]
Yes, tbh I’d forgotten the ‘Keep’ option.

Well we have a point of disagreement here. No matter how it happens, and I’m not arguing probablilities, I’d see them as equally unacceptable.

[*] Well, a clue is all we’d need. We’re not looking at squeezing the last second of recording time here: I’d think that the trigger could come up at ½ - 1 hour remaining after the schedule is applied. The software could easily use average bit rates to get a good enough estimate to that level of accuracy