Back 2 Back episodes.

[dmenegoni]

 When my favourite programs are being aired back to back or even three in a row and IceTV is sending them through as 2 or 3 seperate timers, the start and ends of those episodes are being screwd around due to my BWP1 having a padding setting.
Is there anyway Ice TV could recognise this and just send through scheduled back to back timers on a single channel as one timer? - I can split it later but what I can't do is cut and paste. 

[tonymy01]

The Beyonwiz padding is ignored for back to back actually, it is really the networks screwing around by making their shows go past the advertised timeslot (to attract ratings and have people stay on a channel rather than move away to watch something start on another channel in the next timeslot).

[dmenegoni]

The Beyonwiz padding is ignored for back to back actually

Are you sure - I'll give it a go tomorrow night with SG-Atlantis and just let the timmer run unaltered - fingers crossed.

it is really the networks screwing around by making their shows go past the advertised timeslot (to attract ratings and have people stay on a channel rather than move away to watch something start on another channel in the next timeslot).

True - So far channel 7Two have been pretty good with thier scheduling.

[Daniel Hall at IceTV]

From what I understand the padding is only ignored in back to back situations on the Beyonwiz if padding priority is set to "None".

[prl]

From what I understand the padding is only ignored in back to back situations on the Beyonwiz if padding priority is set to "None".

That is correct. The padding priorities "Pre-padding" and "Post-padding" will cause padding to over-ride the programmed time of other conflicting timers. Pre-padding priority will cause the previous timer in a back-to-back pair to finish earlier than its programmed (unpadded) time, and post-padding priority will cause the following timer of the pair to start later than its programmed (unpadded) time.

I don't think that any of the padding options on the Beyonwiz are all that useful, and especially not pre-padding priority, because the broadcasters don't run their shows an equal or predictable amount off-schedule.

If you have a padding conflict, you are likely to miss part of one or both shows involved in the conflict, no matter what your padding settings are. IIRC, Topfield HD recorders behave the same in padding conflict as a Beyonwiz with padding priority "None" and pre-padding time 0 min.

[tonymy01]

Whoops, sorry about that.   I just figured no sane person would run with anything other than a padding priority of "none"  :D.  I have 5mins pre, 20mins post, priority none, and 99% of the time I am happy (albeit that I have to be careful when deleting stuff of ensuring, if it is a later show than the one on the same channel before it, I don't delete the end of the proceeding show).

I guess back to the o.p. question, it would be handy for some to have timers aggregate for some PVRs (not the Topfield 7100 though, given that file editing really isn't possible with that, certainly you can't delete a chunk of a file and claim back HDD space, nor separate a recording, anyway).  I think it may cause a few headaches for the ICE algorithms about what the PVR already has set vs what ICE is trying to schedule though...   and then you have the dozens of permutations about how people feel the combined filename should be put together for combined shows...

(PerlTGD is a nice solution for the 5K... you don't like the way it appends adjacent timer names together, well, given it is open sourced and partially configurable in the ini file anyway, just change it!).

[prl]

Whoops, sorry about that.   I just figured no sane person would run with anything other than a padding priority of "none"  :D. ...

Then about 30% of Beyonwiz owners aren't sane by that rule. :)

If all broadcasters ran consistently the same amount late, thenpadding by exactly that amount  and using post-padding priority would solve the problem perfectly.

Unfortunately, they don't, but there is a rationale for post-padding priority in that a user may think it more important to get the ends of programs with conflicting padding than to get their beginnings. I don't know whether that's the reason that about a quarter of users in the poll chose post-padding priority, but it was (at the time) a moderately common choice.

Just under 2/3 of those who responded to the poll chose "None", and I don't hear much clamour for padding priority options from HD Topfield owners whose PVRs only have the equivalent of the Beyonwiz padding priority None.

I can't see a rationale for using pre-padding priority.

Where possible, I use a third tuner to resolve padding conflicts across different services, and I use "play back-to-back programs back-to-back" when they're on the same service. :) Combining timers only works for back-to-back programs on the same service.