I would have thought that a 1 minute interval would have been appropriate considering its a system designed to allow you record shows remotely.
I would have also thought if you going to introduce this feature then you would have the correct sever specs to be able to cope with the influx.
There's several important things to note...
- The amount of server load goes up drastically when you reduce the time to something like 1 min. It really is at least 15 times the work.
- All that extra bandwidth and server load can be used on other cool things we're developing. Hopefully you'll enjoy the new features we're working on more than an extra 14 minutes accuracy for IceTV Remote.
- The interval is about 15 mins. That doesn't mean each request will take 15 mins to be sent home... if it's been 10 mins since the last request then your media center should get it in about 5 mins. However, we really didn't design the service to be something that works in realtime. It was never intended for users to try and schedule at the last possible second.
- Media center PCs check about every 15 mins. Macs running Elgato's EyeTV software check with a minimum interval of 1 hour (as mentioned by Dan, but I thought it was worth repeating)! This is interval is set by Elgato, not IceTV. I think you'll find 15 mins is very respectable when compared to any other similar services around the world. The best way to have things work instantly would be to set up your media center as a server and access it directly, but that negates all the hard work we've done for you
- Having your media center check our server every minute will also use up 15 times the bandwidth at your end, which might not matter to you, but we want to keep our service as lean and mean as possible for everyone's benefit.
I'm out to dinner with some friends and we are talking about the latest episode of whatever. I then remember that it's on tonight and it starts in 5 minutes..
Don't worry I say to my wife, I have my mobile with me, I'll just record it from here, that way you can watch it when you get home.
So while I agree it's slightly less impressive to not have it work instantly (or within 1 min), I hope you still find it useful. Keep in mind that a lot of shows run late, so if it's 8.30 and you schedule a show that's supposed to begin at 8.30, you still might catch the start of it
Don't take this as us saying it'll never be realtime... we're all as keen about this technology as you are and we want everything we do to be the best it possibly can be, but right now 15 min intervals seem like the smart choice.
