Recordings 'Keep up to' behavior / reserve tuners

[veehexx1 12]

could the behaviour change for the 'keep up to' limit to be a limit that will not record new episodes?

currently it will keep X recordings but as new shows appear then the older recordings will be deleted and the latest one recorded. This is fine if you ONLY care about disk space or for time-critical content (eg: news), but some programs (eg: documentaries or a sitcom) you'd probably not care about having the latest X episodes of.

What this means is that if you have a dual TV tuner, there are times when both tuners can be in use and live tv cannot be watched. We see this most during prime time resulting in a low WAF as the tuner is recording the latest episodes of something else.

i'm using the 'keep up to' option as a way to limit disk space, limit SSD wear, and to allow tuners to be available once the initial recordings have been done. I think ultimately i care more about not  having all tuners in use which makes LiveTV fail if they are all used. Having a way to limit concurrent recordings, reserve at least 1 tuner for livetv (or recordings) or some other method would increase the WAF.

I've migrated from mythtv to emby, so this is a difference between mythtv (my desired behaviour) and emby but there's also some differences with how the sql db handles things like mythtv being aware of what has been recorded even if it's no longer in the library. Myhttv can then avoid previously recorded episodes, record new unwatched episodes, AND keep a maximum recording. Emby seems to behave as 'no library content, no db records'.

I'm currently adding additional disk space and seriously looking into a 4ch tuner as both will be beneficial to me as an immediate solution.

[Luke 37065]

Hi, I'm a little unclear on what exactly you're asking for. Under what conditions would you prefer that older recordings are deleted?

[veehexx1 12]

only when manually deleted.

 

[Luke 37065]

Ok so then why not just disable the keep up to option and delete manually?

[veehexx1 12]

i'm using the 'keep up to' setting as a way to limit disk usage and tuner usage.

longer running shows have many series & episodes so you could for example end up with 300 recordings (12 series, 20 episodes) for just one schedule. multiply that over a few schedules with popular shows, plus watching LiveTV and you can see how you could potentially either run out of tuners at certain times, or for my usage where i tend to keep 3-6 recordings of 1 show rather than have the full 300 recordings filling up disk space.

hope i'm explaining it right....

let say the above example of 300 episodes at 30mins/each, 1.5gb/hour file size = 225GB total disk space. Add multiple series of similar size then than 225GB can easily turn into 1TB+.

[Spaceboy 2493]

why don't you use the record only new episodes option?

[veehexx1 12]

that'd be fine if i wanted just new episodes - i do make use of new-only recording rules but its not suitable for EVERY scenario. A lot of the recording schedules i have are shows that get repeated.

Just for arguments sake - Top gear, The Big Bang Theory, Friends are all long running series which if you kept all would end up with a lot of disk space used. I specifically chose these as examples as they are both world-wide known titles and on UK TV these can be ran back-to-back for many hours which results in tuners being used for that duration.

These are also shows which i beleive are heavily repeated at weekends; so Top gear and Friends could have 3-4 hours (or more) solid of back-to-back 'binge watching' listings on different channels so i'd have 2 tuners constantly in use and (if that was my max tuner count) would mean none free for other recording schedules or LiveTV.

if i set a limit of 5 episodes (with 0 in local storage), that would mean the next 5 episodes are recorded. Once 5 has been met the recording rule should then essentially enter a 'paused/disabled' state until i've watched & deleted an episode. Once deleted and count drops below 5, it would then resume to record the next match.

Currently it doesnt. it will record every episode and delete the oldest so it keeps the latest 5 broadcasted episodes reguardless of if you've watched them or not. This method causes un-nessasary SSD wear & keep tuners unnessasarily in use.

Does that clear things up and explain my viewpoint on this?

[Spaceboy 2493]

kind of but i'm not sure your proposed solution really guarantees the fix you are looking for.

its still entirely possible that due to what you've watched the tuners will be busy when you want to watch live tv.

what is needed, and i think has been acknowledged but i wouldnt expect it in the near future, is some sort of prioritisaton for tuner usage. going back to WMC days you could chose to watch something even when tuners were busy and WMC would ask you which recording you wished to interrupt. or if you were watching live tv and a tuner was required for a scheduled reocrding WMC would ask you if it could kick you off, if you didnt respond within 30s or so it did it automatically

if i were you i would either

• record or otherwise obtain the shows you want to binge watch
• get an iptv subscription that includes binge watch channels or
• add more tuners

[veehexx1 12]

thinking about it, you could be right with the 'doesnt really guarantee..'.

ssd writes; assuming you keep the content (rather than delete and let scheduler re-record in the future) then you'd get a lot of writes as content fills out (say over 2 months) but then nothing for the remainder of the year so the year average would be no different than limiting to 5 and spreading out over the year.

Priorities would aid the issue. i'd care less about the repeats, and personally would prioritise new content and livetv over that.

i did end up buying another 2 tuners (total of 4x DVB-S2 tuners now) so hopefully that will stop hitting concurrent in-use tuners.

somewhat unrelated to emby but i have been looking at increasing my storage so looks like i'll be turning into a bit of a content horder

[Carlo 4330]

On 4/9/2021 at 1:44 PM, Spaceboy said:

what is needed, and i think has been acknowledged but i wouldnt expect it in the near future, is some sort of prioritisaton for tuner usage. going back to WMC days you could chose to watch something even when tuners were busy and WMC would ask you which recording you wished to interrupt. or if you were watching live tv and a tuner was required for a scheduled reocrding WMC would ask you if it could kick you off, if you didnt respond within 30s or so it did it automatically

If I remember correctly Beyond TV & Sage TV also did this.