Could someone who knows confirm how the Vestel PVRs (T816 in particular if they are different) deal with conflicting recordings caused by Accurate Recording attempting to start a new recording early whilst both tuners are currently being used for recording. Will priority be given to the start of the new programme or will the start be delayed until one of the current recordings is completed. If this is so will the new programme start reliably even though there is no Now/Next signal or time based signal to trigger it.

I'm concerned about this now because of ITV's intention to trigger the start of all their broadcasts early so that the adverts at the end of the previous programme are included at the start of the recording. This will greatly increase the probability of conflicting recordings for anyone who regularly uses dual recording and records ITV programmes. Although the problem will exist for any channels which starts programmes early.

It is difficult to simulate this behaviour to test it in advance as it is obviously not possible to schedule events requiring three simultaneous events. The scenario relies on the demand for a third simultaneousl event to be triggered by a demand from an Accurate Recording trigger. I will try and simulate it by recording some BBC programmes and observing what happens when one starts early. The problem will be in identifying when that has occurred.

Colin

CH 4 have been doing this for a while as well

@niall, what have Channel Four been doing as well?

@creddish, I've not had the situation occur with my T816. However, if the boxes follow the Freeview Playback specification, they should continue recording and then switch to the early starting programme. A box with group 2, would use series link to see if the early starting episode was repeated and record the repeat instead.

I can't be sure where all three programmes are event types, but when the first two are timed and the next is event, priority is given to recording through to the timer end before starting an event type, which starts as soon as a tuner is free.

I have had a couple of situations where two timed (weekly repeat) programmes ending at the same time have caused the beginning of an event recording on a third channel to be clipped at the start by a minute or so, because it started early by that amount. The recording then completed as expected for an event.

I don't think you need to look for three back to back events to trial though. Keeping one tuner busy recording the first channel during the overlap of two back to back events on a second and third channel would give you equally valid results.

Where does it say that? I thought Series Record (Alternate instance) only dealt with scheduling clashes, ie if a programme clashed with 2 others but a repeat was available then it would book the repeat instead.

Thanks for your response. Could you clarify please? Do you mean you have not had the situation where Accurate Recording would have required three tuners to deal with an early start that is being requested, or that you have had the situation and it has been dealt with adequately. If the latter could you say what happened?

I don't recall anything in the Freeview Playback specs that requires what you describe. I had assumed that Series Link would only allocate an Alternate Instance at the time the timer for the next instance of a programme was set up. I didn't think that a PVR would be expected to do this dynamically when a conflicting Accurate Recording occurs.

Colin

Thanks for response PTD. I think you may have partially answered my query in another thread but I couldn't find it when I looked before starting this thread.

I don't expect it makes any difference if the current recordings are timed or event type as at the time the Accurate Recording trigger is received this is of no significance I think.

So hopefully there will be no new major problems when ITV implement their policy. I'll just have to assume that the programme (according to ITV) is running to time and skip forward 4 minutes at the start of playback and then scroll back if I've gone too far because the programme is running late.

I've read your last paragraph about six times and I think I now almost understand what you are saying. I'll have to try it in practice to convince myself. .

I was partly concerned about this issue because I vaguely recall that the Humax 9200 has difficulty coping with a similar situation to this resulting in missed recordings. I wondered if the Vestels had a problem for the same reason.

Colin

To clarify, I haven't had the situation with an early start, so I can't say whether the T816 follows the spec.

Thanks for the clarification.

Colin

A mini-timeline view would be along the lines of:

One tuner is kept busy with ProgA, leaving the second tuner to cope with events ProgB and ProgC, which is going to be easier to find and set up.

Thanks for that PTD. Isn't there a saying "a picture is worth a thousand words"? How did you do that? Maybe you remember, you were the one who told me how to insert Link shortcuts into posts before Digital Spy made it even easier to do. Maybe it's related to that?

Anyway back on topic. I did something yesterday on the lines you suggested. I did a continuous series of 1 hour recordings between 10am and 6pm alternately on the BBC News 24 and Sky Sports channels all of which were scheduled to start on the hour. I chose these channels because they display time information banners which I could uses as a real time reference. I expected BBC News 24 to transmit Accurate Recording signals and Sky Sports not to do so. This way it would be easy to see the effects of early starts of News 24 on the follow-on recording of Sky Sports. I used a series of recordings on an ITV channels which started about half way through each hour to keep one of the tuners busy throughout the test period. Choosing these start times made sure they would not interfere with the changeover of the test recordings.

However things didn't work out as planned. Firstly either all the programmes started exactly on time or Accurate Recording signals were not being transmitted on BBC News 24 on that day as there was no evidence of any conflicts. What did happen was that all the BBC News 24 and Sky Sports recordings were badly corrupted with large gaps in the content and sections of the recordings being from the CBeebies and TMF channels. I have posted about this aspect in a post here in a thread discussing similar corruption by another Vestel user. I discovered later that work was being carried out on the Hannington transmitter on that day which could have accounted for the corrupt recordings and even the lack of AR signals. I'll have to try again if I get day to spare.

Colin

Nothing clever, it's mostly underlines and that Alt-Gr character I never new the name of to the left of '1' on your keyboard. Compose one line as a base and copy it to the second and third, then highlight and replace character for character to preserve the alignment. Then wrap it in the code tag after highlighting as you would for urls. (# symbol in the edit window). The code tag just keeps everything monospaced and aligned. If it was going to be anything more complex I'd have done it in Notepad first I think where you can use a monospaced font directly.

That's unfortunate. These machines can become a little obtuse from time to time. I'm considering using Futaura's reboot trick on a weekly basic for keeping things in order, although I've not had any of the troubles you describe since banning myself indiscriminate use of the search option.

BBC tends to move heaven and earth to keep news programmes on time it seems to me, so possibly not ideal for AR trials. Children's programmes on CBBC or CBeebies on the other hand are ideal because they are short and rarely start on time, but still comply with AR.

Good suggestion to use CBeebies when lots of recordings are required. When I do that I usually keep them for the grandchildren to watch when they come anyway. Only problem is they starts at un-usual times so I would have to write down the scheduled times so that I can make comparisons with actual start times afterwards. Also to check conflicts I need two recordings on different channels to be scheduled to start at the same time to produce potential conflicts. I have another problem because the clocks on both my PVRs are running 17s late so events that start on time are often identified in the Library with the time recorded as the previous minute. Why the clocks are inaccurate I need to investigate.

Colin