Hey guys, it's probably too soon for a definitive answer to this question, but will Ice be able to dynamically change the recording times of programs in the same way as Freeview's new EPG (apparently). I realise that there are licensing issues with their system but I'm unsure whether it will exclude Ice from using it. It certainly would be nice not to have to go to the trouble of putting a 20 minute pad on my recordings and still, in some cases, miss the end (Damn you Channel 9) 
This is my reply to Nodeity's post on the
same topic on the Beyonwiz forum.
From discussions I've had with IceTV support folk on another issue, IceTV isn't permitted to record programs (the provisions in the Copyright Act that allow home recording of TV shows precludes any commercial use). Capturing the whole of the EPG would probably be a risky business, especially given the line that Nine has taken in the past, and it would be hard to see how something like this would be implemented without capturing the whole EPG stream. From my (non-legal) understanding, much of IceTV's defense against Nine was that they were only taking very small amounts of information from the published schedules.
Anyway, as I've said several times in the past, I think that this capability is rather over-rated. It would suit VCR-like use of a PVR, where you predominantly watch live TV, and occasionally record. It improves things slightly, but doesn't really fix the problem if you have a crowded recording schedule, which is how many of the folk on the forum run their PVRs, recording most or all of what they watch, and watching little live TV.
For example, if you have (for simplicity's sake) a single tuner PVR, and have scheduled a program from 19:30 to 20:30 on Nine, and something else from 20:30 to 21:30 on Seven, but the Nine program finishes at 20:40 and the Seven program starts at 20:35, no clever timer scheduling stuff can prevent you missing part of one program. From the vague fluff that Freeview has published, you'd probably get all of the show on Nine and and miss the first five minutes of the Seven show, but you're definitely going to miss
something. This situation will occur roughly 50% of the time that you have consecutive timers on different services and no spare recording stream or tuner. That's an improvement over padding, where you have this problem 100% of the time, but it doesn't make the problem go away.
The Topfields that can record four streams from up to two tuners will manage this somewhat better than Beyonwizes, but it's still possible to construct realistic scenarios where program content will be lost on them, too (for example if you're recording something from both Nine and Ten from 19:30 to 20:30 in the example above).
Even for consecutive programs on the same service, where it does offer a pretty big improvement, it's not likely to solve the problem all the time. Because programs go straight from credits of one show straight into the start of the next, unless the timing is accurate to seconds, there'll be some "leakage" of one show into the wrong recording.
The Freeview EPG will have some advantages over using padding, but IMO the Freeview EPG pages oversell its reliability. Now
there's a surprise. :roll:
