Iwan,
Yes in theory I believe that was always the case, however to some limited extent I've tried to improve this. However its somewhat untested, however when using a series link it should be slightly more robust (more prone to recording duplicates than missing things, though again dup detect is attempted).
I can see where your coming from on this, the problem is that from a simplistic point of view it works like this:
1. You select an episode in EPG and hit record series.
2. It creates an autorec rule based on the series identifier of that episode (or fallback to title if no series info exists).
3. It searches the full schedule for any linked episodes and sets up record entries, typically taking the earliest entries first (for reasons mentioned).
I admit this is slightly different to a sky box, but they actually understand the data they have
so there might be cues in there to say what time to record at etc... I was worried that if I tried to constrain the time in some way (which isn't difficult) I'd then miss series that are shown back to back for many hours (it happens quite a lot). So I thought I'd keep it simple (at least for now).
When I come to look at the DVR code (so far I've made very few mods to get series link included) I could certainly do some more clever things, such as set the time based on selected episode and use this as a "preferred" time. In other words record at the selected time in preference to other times, but still record stuff outside of that time frame if no better alternative exists. This would probably be closer to a sky box.
However personally I'd prefer to improve the basic DVR scheduling to make use of the info regarding repeat airings to try and resolve conflicts automatically and typically the best thing in this case is to always try and record the earliest show (to give more opportunity for repeat recordings). But its not a trivial problem to deal with all the scheduling etc..
I think having some "advanced" options to help the user guide/override things would be useful. I'll think about what might be useful and try to put a basic form together in the UI (but not just yet), which might serve as an example for XBMC later down the line.
I did put a doc together some time ago on some of my DVR thoughts, but this is definitely all future work.
https://docs.google.com/a/adamsutton.me....KP_-Y/edit
With respect to automatically updating the recording schedule when you change the autorec rule, this is actually a trivial thing to do. So I will think about whether this is a good idea (maybe with user option to re-schedule etc..).
Adam
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