Personalized Intelligent Recording and Scheduling

[Panpiper]

Quoting someone else's feature; "A SageTV exclusive that utilizes proprietary algorithms to determine your interests based on past viewing habits and automatically records programs for you."

Well, it's not exactly exclusive. I understand that both ReplayTV and Tivo do something similar.

Truth is this is THE feature I most want and it appears that BTV does not have it. Are there any plans to include this in the future? If BTV had this feature, I would buy it right now.

Digressing rant: I am a Canadian who would have bought Tivo years ago if it wasn't illegal for me to do so. It galls me more than Bush that no Canadian provider knows, let alone cares that TV in Canada is back in the bloody stone ages. They complacently sit behind their protectionist walls. This protectionism is certainly against the spirit of the North American Free Trade Agreement, if not the rules.

[Brett]

Originally Posted by Panpiper

Truth is this is THE feature I most want and it appears that BTV does not have it. Are there any plans to include this in the future?

Well... I actually have had discussions with the head developer concerning intelligent recording, and I know they are "experimenting" with some algorithms in-house. I even gave a few suggestions. So, I know they are definitely making some progress on this particular feature, but I don't know what the exact timeline is for release.

-Brett

[Rich A]

Only TIVO (not ReplayTV) has that feature. I was beta testing the original ReplayTVs and this subject came up a lot. Some people thought having the application try to figure out your interests and record like-programming would be cool. After you find your hard drive FULL of every dad-blamed western or Sci-Fi show that was on for just a few days, you'll think about it again.

I too, thought it was cool. Until until I found that I would be spending more time deleting unwanted shows that viewing them.

Of course some people like that stuff.

What ReplayTV DOES have is something called "Zones". You can go to a seperate menu and have multiple listings (a lot) like Sports / then Football, baseball yadda yadda. Or movie classics. Or letterbox only. Or by MPAA rating and well just a ton of different gendres to browse. When you choose one with the ReplayTV, it will scan ahead the next two weeks and find every show matching your request. You can then pick and choose individual shows OR create a "theme channel" which will then permanately record everything found in that gendre.

The TIVO thing (originally) was more automatic. It just watched your viewing habits and then arbitrarily created "theme channels" to record based on what it found.

This also brought forth a lot of bickering and debate as both ReplayTV and more-so TIVO were thinking about using the data found in other enterprises. (like building data bases of most watched shows aka Nielson ratings etc.) Many felt this was an invasion of their privacy.

In fact back when there was the "war" between then TIVO and ReplayTV and the major networks .. the networks toyed with sueing TIVO to supply them with the data being store on all the units so they could use that to supply the FCC with data and how so many people were recording and skipping commercials etc. Tivo and Replay finally joined forces and the Network dropped it's suit.

I left the scene some time ago and don't know the latest ramifications. Just thought you'd like to know what that was all about and how it really worked. (I still have a ReplaayTV by the way) And actually make use of it's "zones" to find stuff for my BeyondTV to record. For example, I like to record only the letterbox theater versions of classic movies. So every once in a while I'll scan the ReplayTV Zones for upcoming letter box movies. Jot down a few notables .. then find them on the BeyondTV to record. Beyond TV's search function has gotten better .. but I miss that feature.

[Treetop]

Originally Posted by Rich A

I too, thought it was cool. Until until I found that I would be spending more time deleting unwanted shows that viewing them.

I agree...

The only thing I liked about it was that those shows were the first to be deleted. Before Tivo had folders, it just populated the list with garbage (IMO)... I quickly turned this feature off... then just as quickly, built a HTPC

[Panpiper]

Originally Posted by Rich A

I too, thought it was cool. Until until I found that I would be spending more time deleting unwanted shows that viewing them.

I don't see how that should ever be an issue. The program should simply automatically delete the oldest auto-recorded shows so as to free up sufficient space for new programming. (At least it would if I was programming it.)

[Rich A]

Originally Posted by Panpiper

I don't see how that should ever be an issue. The program should simply automatically delete the oldest auto-recorded shows so as to free up sufficient space for new programming. (At least it would if I was programming it.)

Ah you'd THINK so. Consider the guy with a couple hundred channels available to him and an 80 gb hard drive. (those were the BIG drives back then) Now suppose I had 70 GB of shows I specifically WANTED and had set up to record. Then it found another 50 gb to record of "junk". So you'd want to have it delete the stuff I really specifically wanted ?? To make room for a lot of stuff only SOME of which I wanted?

Or on the other hand, you could have it only delete the "extra suggested" shows to make room for new shows. So you'd end up every day, deleting 10 GB of junk and adding 10 gb of new junk. Now you've only got less than 10 gb of space for only the latest suggestions of which there could be 30 or GB per day.

Either way it's just a waste of time and disk space. If you try eliminating the oldest "suggestions" you end up never seeing 95 percent at all.

Of course today we have 300 GB hard drives .. Even still, the real point is the algorythms aren't even fuzzy logic and they "get" far too much stuff. So even if you had 1. a good way to rotate them and/or 2. lots of disk space, you'd still end up sifting through piles of unwanted junk. I understand most TIVO people turn the feature off. Must be a reason.

[flavius]

Originally Posted by Rich A

..So even if you had 1. a good way to rotate them and/or 2. lots of disk space, you'd still end up sifting through piles of unwanted junk. I understand most TIVO people turn the feature off. Must be a reason.

One of those reasons is that most people don't understand how it works. It does, for example, not affect scheduled recordings. I'm not surprised, and like the idea that snapstream could to be working on something like this. Now, what about the wishlist? That should be a lot easier to do.
On the other hand, I'm going to keep the TiVo anyway.

[Brett]

Originally Posted by flavius

Now, what about the wishlist? That should be a lot easier to do.

I may be wrong here (perhaps a first?) but I believe this is already possible. While not implemented within BTV "viewscape", the SDK I believe does indeed support scheduling recurring recordings by keyword (ie: wishlist). So if some little creative hacker were to modify the open source webadmin they could atleast add the feature that way.

Anyway, I am actively trying to get Rkuo to publically post some "kind" of upcoming features roadmap. He is a little reserved, I guess because well plans occasionally change and some members don't always take it so well...

No worries though, they are all actively developing over there

-Brett

[TV Scheduler]

If I remember right my TiVo picked stuff to record based on what 'most' people were watching.

I have my scheduler setup to record the TV Shows I picked first. Then after that's done the scheduler picks movies based on genre.

I had written out how to do AutoPicks based on viewing habits but I liked is so well I just couldn't give it away..... Sorry.

Bob

[not_Shorty]

yes, I imagine it is something like this:

it reports what you've watched to a central database with everybody's viewing habits
it takes what you've watched and compares it to other people's viewing habits
finds things in common
then takes things from the other people that had some stuff in common with you, cuz maybe you'll like it, since you liked some similar things with those people already

[TV Scheduler]

Yes, but what they would get are the viewing habits from a household.

Dad watched one show.
Mom watched another.

You watched the same show Dad watched so the database thinks you might like what Mom watched.

You could do better with just the age and gender of the viewers.

If you asked the viewers to rate some TV shows and movies you could do well enough to please most folks.

Bob

[not_Shorty]

hmm, I don't much see the point of comparing machine A to machine A. Mom's show is already on the machine, so, I don't get your reasoning. I'm talking about comparing your machine to every other machine out there. If you watch ER, Formula 1 racing, Survivor, and Seinfeld, and tons of other people in the world watch Formula 1 racing, Survivor, Seinfeld, and Will & Grace, then your machine might record Will & Grace as a result of all the other people that watch similar things to you. We're not talking about comparing 3 or 4 machines here. We're talking about an entire userbase. I'd be very surprised if this isn't similar to how tivo does it.

[mlbdude]

This is a feature I miss from SageTV since moving to MCE. It was great to have a revolving cache of items to watch without commercials. Never had to bother deleting anything or scheduling items. It was especially nice when I forgot to schedule something or it was a new show it generally would pick it up automatically.

People do generaly missunderstand this feature. They tend to freak out when they look and have 10 hours of recording and only 2 hours of it is something they want. That is how it is supposed to work . If you get 2 new hours every day of comercial free items to watch that is great. From my own experience, after using it for a few months it was at the point it was getting 8 hours out of 10 of good stuff (generaly movies as I am a movie buff).

[Edgarmoon]

Ok, to avoid further derailing, let's simplify this request.

Can we get a some plugin that allows us to

1. Search on a genre, actor, etc, or specifically something that searches say IMDB for "other movies people who liked this..." I don't know how advanced the keyword search is, but it is combersome, it would be nice if it was sortable.

2. more advanced and preferred, an agent that you tell what to track (low, medium, high detail) and will search everything in point 1 and give you a constantly updating list of recommended shows. When you feel like it, you can browse this list and select which shows you want recorded.

This will give you the option without forcing it down your throught.

[TV Scheduler]

Your request appears to be mostly related to the interface. That would have to come after you figure out what to look for.

These are the items my AutoScheduler looks for. Explaining all the logic would take to long for a post and most of it is just common sense. The more information given the less likely it will be recorded.

IgnoreHistory would allow a show that has been deleted to be re-recorded.

Have I missed anything?

#start
Title=
SubTitle=
Person=
Before=
After=
Year=
Station=
Channel=
Keyword=
TVGenre=
MovieGenre=
VideoFolder=
IgnoreHistory=
#end

Bob