Combine Consecutive Timers at the IceTV level?

Started by Paul, May 21, 2015, 09:44:20 AM

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Paul

I know this has been talked about before, but any chance of this being implemented any time soon? Would be great for IceTV to combine consecutive timers rather than doing it manually like a do now. I know TEDs and Smart EPG can do that, but want a one stop solution that comes from the IceTV website.

Thanks, Paul.

IanL-S

I agree about the desirability of having this option.

When I tried using SmartEPG I found that it did not behave well with timers set using IceTV Interactive (but that was with version 3.x). It may work OK with later versions; I have a feeling that DeltaMikeCharlie uses them together - but I think he only uses IceTV EPG data rather than using IceTV Interactive.

Ian
IceTV: IceBox + BYOB IceBox + 2xTRF-2400 + 2xTF7100HDPVRtPlus + SKIPPA [RIP] + T2 + U4 + V2
No IceTV: a few Toppys and T2
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csutak40

Quote from: paulgraham on May 21, 2015, 09:44:20 AM
I know this has been talked about before, but any chance of this being implemented any time soon? Would be great for IceTV to combine consecutive timers rather than doing it manually like a do now. I know TEDs and Smart EPG can do that, but want a one stop solution that comes from the IceTV website.

Thanks, Paul.

Yes, I have been asking for this from the beginning of the Skippa saga, but I doubt it will be on there.  There are some people who prefer separate timers for each show, I never understood why.  You end up with unnecessary padding and/or the end of a show at the beginning of another. 

Of course, as the specifications for Skippa are still secret, we'll just have to wait patiently.  The website promises 3 days, 18 hours etc before one can pre-order it, so I am hoping that we are not expected to buy a pig in a poke :-) and they will publish the specifications at the same time
Cheers,
Judy
Last Update Dec 9 2020; Beyonwiz V2, T2,

DeltaMikeCharlie

Quote from: IanL-S on May 21, 2015, 05:22:13 PM
I have a feeling that DeltaMikeCharlie uses them together - but I think he only uses IceTV EPG data rather than using IceTV Interactive.
I have 2 PVRs, one supports ICE, the other does not.

I do not set timers using the ICE web site because I have never been able to get the timers that I create on the web site into my PVR reliably (~80% failure rate).  ICE is used purely for its EPG feed and the fact that I can get a repeat flag.  I use the AutoScheduler TAP to do my keyword searching on this PVR.

On the other PVR, I use SmartEPG because of my development work with WebControl.  It uses FTA EPG only.

To the best of my knowledge, SmartEPG will not currently work with the ICE EPG feed.  This is because SmartEPG harvests EPG data by decoding and saving the EIT data for each network directly from the DVB stream.  Just recently, the new "LiveEPG" feature has been added that will read the EPG from the PVR's RAM directly.

To make SmartEPG work with ICE EPG, the authors of SmartEPG would have to stop performing the EIT scans and open LiveEPG to scan all networks, not just the current one being viewed.

When timers are created on the PVR from an ICE EPG source, there are a number of additional fields saved in the timer flash record that I have not yet been able to decode.  I suspect that these fields would be required to get the timer to show correctly back on the ICE web site.

An alternative would be to download and process the ICE EPG from the XML source and then feed it into SmartEPG via a TGD file, however, the TGD format lacks may fields that would normally be very useful.

Last year some time, mention was made of a new XML feed that was bidirectional allowing timer data to be returned to ICE as well as EPG data to be fetched.  If this feed ever eventuates, I was planning on looking into writing a TAP to utilise it.

raymondjpg

Quote from: csutak40 on May 21, 2015, 05:53:39 PMThere are some people who prefer separate timers for each show, I never understood why.  You end up with unnecessary padding and/or the end of a show at the beginning of another. 
Can anyone from IceTV explain to me why this feature could not be implemented easily in an optional form i.e. Combined consecutive timer or not??

I'm one of many whose PVRs do not play nicely with consecutive shows, and in my case I prefer to combine consecutive timers manually.
Beyonwiz T2, Beyonwiz U4, IceBox BYO with Hauppauge WinTV-dualHD (x2), Hauppauge WinTV-quadHD

IanL-S

IceTV: IceBox + BYOB IceBox + 2xTRF-2400 + 2xTF7100HDPVRtPlus + SKIPPA [RIP] + T2 + U4 + V2
No IceTV: a few Toppys and T2
Synology NAS
Check out the oztoppy wiki and oztoppy Forum for Toppy help