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[muzicman0]

I know this has been asked many times, but I wanted to throw this out there again...can we please get the TV recording functionality moved away from the main application?  Preferably into a service.  I know the argument has been that it would overly complicate things, and that if crashes happen, we should get to the bottom of why the crashes are happening.

I had a situation last night where the MC crashed when my wife tried to access the guide.  I was upstairs on my MC client PC watching something else.  It was probably 2-3 minutes before I got downstairs and restarted MC.  Here's the kicker...I was in the middle of a recording.  After restart, it immediately started recording that show again, but now I had 2 files...which makes sense, but one of them was 11 minutes, and the other was 50 minutes, which means it never actually stopped recording after the crash (it was a 60 minute show)...it only stopped after I closed the program (or in this case, I clicked OK on the Windows message), which means I missed only 20-30 seconds...not a big deal, but still.  This implies to me that the recording process isn't what crashed, it was probably some other aspect of the program, unrelated to recording.

All that to say, if the recording process would have been in a service, it would have continued on just fine, and I wouldn't have missed part of my show last night.  It just seems to make sense to move this feature into a separate process so that if MC crashes for some other reason, it doesn't mess with my recordings.

I very rarely get crashes, but when I do, I really don't want it to interrupt the TV recording.

mm0

[greynolds]

+1

The lack of using a recording service is one of the main reasons why I don't feel JRiver can replace WMC for my TV duties.  There are times when I want to shut down the JRiver UI, but would like any scheduled recordings to proceed anyway.

The other main reason is that the functionality for setting up scheduled recordings isn't flexible enough (for example, there's no way to setup JRiver to record all Boston Bruins games without getting a LOT of other unwanted recordings in the process - this is something that WMC, Tivo, etc. can easily accomplish).

[JimH]

Media Server will record when MC is closed.

Record by keyword was added recently.

[greynolds]

Record by keyword was added recently.

This topic probably belongs in a different thread, but just recording by keyword isn't sufficient as it will end up recording a ton of stuff that you don't want along with the stuff you do want.  I just upgraded to version 20.0.37 and don't see a way to setup a keyword search - where should that option be, I don't see anything listed as "keyword" in the release notes?

One way that Windows Media Center handles this is to specify a keyword search within a category.  So for Boston Bruins games, I setup a recording as follows:

1) Go into the Recorded TV list, and select "Add Recording" at the top.
2) Choose "Wish List or Keyword".
3) Choose "Generic Keyword".
4) Enter "NHL Hockey Boston Bruins At"
5) Choose "Add a Category".
6) Select Sports -> Hockey.

I also set it up to record only "new" shows and have it record 90 minutes extra, which is enough to get a playoff game that goes through a full period of overtime (at which point, I would normally be caught up to live TV in case it went longer).

While this still gets a small amount of extra noise from recent games repeated on the NHL network with slightly different titles and listed as new, it's minimal and ends up working extremely well.  Last time I setup a keyword search for Bruins games in Media Center, I ended up with a TON of extra shows scheduled to record in addition to the actual new hockey games.  Given that the games aren't always on at the same time (sometimes at 1PM on the weekend, and 7PM, 7:30PM, 8PM, and 10PM, depending on who and where they're playing) and aren't always on the same channel (most often NESN, but sometimes on NBCSN, or NBC), I just couldn't come up with a way to make it work.

As has been suggested numerous times, you guys really need to spend some quality time (not just a few hours as some people suggest) using WMC, SageTV, and some of the other well respected DVR options (perhaps including Tivo) to see how they handle these sorts of things.  There are a number of subtle, but important things, that you won't find if you just spend a few hours with each.

Your TV functionality isn't THAT far off, as in I don't think it would take a ton of development effort to close the gap and perhaps exceed what the others have done.  But the pieces that are currently missing are, IMHO, critical functionality.

[RoderickGI]

I very rarely get crashes, but when I do, I really don't want it to interrupt the TV recording.

Do you allow multiple instances of MC to run? (Option -> General -> Advanced)

I'm wondering if in the circumstances you had above, if you allowed multiple instances and just started a new instance, maybe your recording would continue and your wife could watch could use the new instance? Then you could address the crash and the Windows message later when everyone has finished using MC for the night.

Worth a try perhaps. It may make things a lot worse of course.