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krustyreturns · 2014-06-28, 18:30

We have been working on a new recording prefs dialog for both a single episodes and series recordings. The goal is to offer all the useful options wmc offers in its "settings' window, and then some. It's important to get this right, because once they start getting written for skins other than Confluence (which is the only one I am doing), making changes becomes very difficult. So all feedback is welcome.

Here are the options you'll see if you want to record a single episode:

Here are the options you'll see if you want to record a series:

jdlive · 2014-06-30, 18:43

Looks good!

LehighBri · 2014-07-02, 14:16

This is fantastic! Nice work. And it's all the same settings as I'm used to having from SageTV, but in the WMC world (which I'm trying to transition over to).

What does Force do? Not sure when someone would use force vs. not.

And will this also support updating the padding in "real-time"? Aka if I need to update the padding in the middle of while a show is recording?

krustyreturns · 2014-07-02, 19:03

Normally the padding before and after a recorded episode is just applied by the scheduler when possible. In other words, the padding will only be enforced if it doesn't cost and extra tuner allocation to do it. If you check 'force', you are telling the scheduler that you want this padding applied no matter what - even if it causes a recording conflict.

As for updating real time, so far I am just working getting this shown when a new timer is created. Applying it on an existing timer is something I want to do, but so far its not implemented.

FYI: since I posted this, I have added the capability to apply scheduler priority too.

LehighBri · 2014-07-02, 19:16

All sounds fantastic! Great work! Looking forward to trying out the new version (and I'm "all in" on this addon now as I've been using MB3 which has incredible integration and it works like a charm)

wagman67 · 2014-07-03, 06:27

I like it. Looks to have what I would want.

sbthomas · 2014-07-04, 02:42

I like the layout. What options are you planning for "Keep Until:"and "Keep"?

scarecrow420 · 2014-07-04, 02:57

Krusty can confirm but I'd say the options will be the same as WMC, since it's WMC providing this functionality. We just need a way to capture it from the user in XBMC and feed it through to the series recording that we create in WMC. So the Keep Until settings are like "Until Space Needed, Until I Watch, Until I Delete", and the Keep setting is how many episodes to keep (1 2 3 4 .. 10 episodes, as many as possible)

sbthomas · 2014-07-04, 05:59

Looks good, its gonna take a while for me to get my head around how the two settings interact. I'm just starting the migration from dish to SWMC.

I have the dish interface up and it looks like we have hit all the items and even some extras (airtime and day restriction options). The one thing dish has is the priority of the recording. I haven't used SWMC enough yet to know how this is handled. Has conflict/priority resolution been implemented yet?

krustyreturns · 2014-07-04, 18:12

No, not really. This cut of the new recording prefs dialog will be our first implemented method of resolving conflicts. Xbmc has no built-in method for handling conflicts other than deleting a timer, but it does report if there is a conflict in the timer list. By setting the highest priority when a timer is created, you'll be essentially saying if this new timer conflicts with another timer, put it at the top of the priority list so that its the one that records. The same idea for editing an existing timer.

You can also use media center to resolve conflicts in the interim.

krustyreturns · 2014-07-04, 18:40

(2014-07-04, 02:57)scarecrow420 Wrote: Krusty can confirm but I'd say the options will be the same as WMC, since it's WMC providing this functionality. We just need a way to capture it from the user in XBMC and feed it through to the series recording that we create in WMC. So the Keep Until settings are like "Until Space Needed, Until I Watch, Until I Delete", and the Keep setting is how many episodes to keep (1 2 3 4 .. 10 episodes, as many as possible)

In general I am making as many of these options setable on the serverwmc side as possible by editing the config.xml. For instance in the pre-padding spinners, the default values it lets you choose from you can set in the config.xml:

<PrePadDefsMin>0,1,2,3,4,5,10,15,30,60,90,120,180</PrePadDefsMin>

where 'Min' means minutes. In keep lengths though, as you said, wmc has a number of special values that I can't make optional, possibly though the force-keep number of days can be varied to values other than wmc's option of one week. I have to look into that some more, but probably not in the next rev. This dialog thing turned out to be much bigger than I thought it would be Smile

.

krustyreturns · 2014-07-04, 22:06

This is the latest version. I decided to show all the options even if it is set to only record an episode rather than a series. The series-only settings are disabled unless 'Record the series' is selected. This image shows the episode record case.

scarecrow420 · 2014-07-05, 02:56

personally I prefer not showing the full options when it is a non series recording. I have no skinning experience though so no idea how hard/easy it is etc Smile

Will there be a way for the user to set what their defaults are? Is it per client or done in ServerWMC?

Peronally I would even prefer a way to not have to see things like Mon-Sun on the screen since in my case I would always be recording for "any day any channel any time" and the dialog can look overwhelming and complex, showing all those options I wouldn't actually need... I understand it's probably not possible to do stuff like that though since it would presumably have to be via skin options and we don't want to go too far with modifying confluence for this...

krustyreturns · (This post was last modified: 2014-07-06, 20:57 by krustyreturns.)

I go back on forth on your first point. In our current custom dialog we do the 'hiding' when episode is selected. I have noticed though that this is not the xbmc way for doing settings, they disable instead of hide. Also since we will be setting options that will be displayed even for an episode-only type recording (like a movie) it looks weird to present a giant window that is mostly empty (yes, that is a dumb reason). Maybe a compromise is to fade the disabled options further, I think that is easy.

I was going to have the defaults setable in serverwmc, well actually most of the defaults will be a copy of the default settings in wmc. No good? I don't see an advantage to client specific settings.

The record-days is handy for shows that air at lots of different days. And other pvr addons have this option in their custom dialog. However they implement it with a spinner like approach with the settings being 'any day', 'weekends', 'weekday', etc. I decided to just make it totally general - but I can be talked out of this one too. I do think we need the setting though.

As for overall complexity that doesn't bother me, as a user I want to see all the settings and have the option to change them rather than not seeing them at all. The only thing that does bother me as a user, is when the useful settings are at the bottom so I have click all the way down to get to them, so I have put the more common ones toward the top. Also by putting the ok/cancel buttons on the side it makes it quick to confirm the dialog after you have clicked down to the setting you want to change.