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robmich · 2015-04-04, 20:29

Let me drop a few more thoughts... The reason is this is so interesting to me aside from the WAF is that while I am a bit late to the SWMC world, I been doing HTPC since long before it was popular and WMC has one big thing going for it.. It just works. The interface is ugly but it works well.. I used WMC for years before moving to SageTV for the higher level of WAF. Sage is gone and I got busy with life so I went over to the dark side and signed up for DISH and their Hopper/Joey concept. While it works, the interface sucks, it's expensive and their version of commercial skip is bad. BUT, the concept of the Prime Time Anytime was great. Now, we never had to worry about setting a timer for a special. They all simply recorded as part of Prime Time. Storage is not an issue, but I was spending 100+ per month for this feature that my wife does not want to give up.

So, XMBC in my mind finally matured with Gotham so I began to look at it again and it is now my primary. Still have Dish and was using Roomie Remote to seamlessly switch between Kodi and WMC but the interfaces don't match... Negative WAF points.

I found SWMC and it's Nirvana for me as everything again is in one place, MCEBuddy handles all my file movements, naming and commercial cutting and life is good. Except for Prime Time.

Your server/client code is brilliant and there are really more closet Windows users out there than most people believe.

If wife is happy, I get to tinker more...

Rob

robmich · 2015-04-05, 01:24

So, giving some thought to the timers, which really is all this feature is...

If your code supports parsing the epg data and then create a basic timer based on the parameters read, this should be easy.

I would suggest that all timers are a once only type and not series. Since the easiest way at least in my mind would be to delete/rebuild timers at the beginning of each week, you end up with the same as a series timer, you would just have a "series" built with weekly record once timers.

You could build in the option of allowing users to select which day to perform prime time recordings and select the time range. However, it may be easier just to say "prime time... daily from 7pm to 10pm. That way you would have less logic to code and your weekly epg parse would be simpler as well.

You would need to add any logic to the storing of the recordings, maybe just the ability to prepend "PT" or something similar to indicate it was a prime time recording.

Let me know if I am posting too much regarding this..

Rob

krustyreturns · 2015-04-05, 05:41

Good stuff. I agree with single episode timers, I think they should be scheduled once a day rather than once a week. Obviously you have to specify the channels along with the time range (we actually already define a prime time range in swmc). I don't see a reason to specify something special about the recordings that are made for them, but appending (or is it prepending?) to the file name shouldn't be too difficult. Do you think they should be grouped in a folder according to channel, (like Primetime Tuesday CBS) or just doing their normal grouping by title? That former might be trickier.

robmich · 2015-04-05, 17:16

(2015-04-05, 05:41)krustyreturns Wrote: Good stuff. I agree with single episode timers, I think they should be scheduled once a day rather than once a week. Obviously you have to specify the channels along with the time range (we actually already define a prime time range in swmc). I don't see a reason to specify something special about the recordings that are made for them, but appending (or is it prepending?) to the file name shouldn't be too difficult. Do you think they should be grouped in a folder according to channel, (like Primetime Tuesday CBS) or just doing their normal grouping by title? That former might be trickier.

Daily would work, less data to parse. I think just the usual grouping would be fine. The logic to track by day/network is interesting as long as it did not kick your butt from a programming standpoint. The simpler this is kept, the less of a chance to introduce "side effects".

Rob

scarecrow420 · 2015-04-06, 07:05

just to throw my 2c in

Yes I prefer daily over weekly. At least in my neck of the woods, the EPG isnt reliable a week out so to account for EPG changes closer to the scheduled time, only doing this each day would be best. Also to allow the user to change their prime time hours or channels, better to be scheduling things daily rather than having a whole week of stuff scheduled that is now not inline wtih the users preferred settings

Yes I agree they should be single instance timers rather than repeating

Having (optional) ways to group them by channel/day would be cool and I think easy enough to do (if you are already sorting them into a special PrimeTime folder there shouldnt be any additional difficulty to further sort them to channel/day/etc)

wtfchuck · 2015-04-07, 16:19

Thanks to the developers of this. It works the best for me after trying many other options.

robmich · 2015-04-07, 21:28

So using a video node menu entry, I have duplicated the "DVR" section from the Dish Hopper. Any recorded shows, get renamed, comskip'ed and moved. Then they get scraped and are available for viewing. There is even a "Prime Time" folder waiting if this all comes to fruition.

Rob

krustyreturns · 2015-04-10, 17:53

Hopefully we can get this into the next rev. If we get something earlier we will give it to you to test first.

cdvreede · 2015-05-19, 07:25

While series recording works fine there are a couple of attributes in Series recording - "delete when" and "keep how many" - that are missing in the interface. As I'm assuming it's the WMC backend that deals with cleanup would it be possible to expose these attributes through the Series recording dialogue screens??

thnx

Dennis

p.s. great job - slowly weaning the family off the WMC interface and onto KODI. a six-tuner backend and Raspberry Pi2's work just fine!!

krustyreturns · 2015-05-19, 17:36

You are right that the wmc service deals with this cleanup, but swmc can set these values if the kodi gui gave it a way to do it. We could implement it with custom series-recording dialogs but we are trying to stay away from doing any more custom dialogs and hoping instead that kodi supports series dialogs in its next rev. This will do away with the custom dialog problem of not being supported in all skins. For right now, swmc uses the default settings for these fields that are set in wmc, and of course you can always start wmc to make changes to them - even if they were scheduled by kodi.

ipguy · 2015-06-23, 13:42

We need an easy way to record, record series.

Specifically like WMC, single press records the show, double records the series, triple cancels

krustyreturns · 2015-06-23, 18:45

I agree, but we can't control this with our addon. There has to be a new kodi gui feature, that internally issues a command to our addon to do the actual recording. Isengard is looking like it will support series recording, but I don't know if this is included (it would be nice if it was) - see the general pvr section above this sub-forum.

scarecrow420 · 2015-06-24, 00:11

It's the version after isengard and I haven't seen any of this type of double/triple press business in the work in progress...

Krusty couldn't we have ServerWMC interpret multiple recording requests received from same client in a given time period do this functionality? Or does Kodi not send a record request if it knows the item is already scheduled to record?

krustyreturns · 2015-06-24, 01:18

The latter I think, you can't get kodi to send on the second record request. If it did, I suppose we could implement it

w84no1 · 2015-08-11, 19:59

Not sure if it has been requested as I didn't go through all 21 pages of this thread, but I use the http service just for the status web page it provides. Is there any way to have the server produce a json response so that I can tie the tuner status into my home automation server. If so, any info provided from the server could be of use.

TIA