Feature Request: start X seconds early

[rothe]

Every recording I make consistently misses the first seven seconds of a program. My best guess is that it takes this long for BTV and my Hauppauge cards to tune and lock onto a given station and then start the recording. I know - I could tell BTV to start 1 minute early, but then I'd have to wade through 53 seconds of commercials before my program starts. It would be nice if I could just tell BTV to start precisely X seconds early. In fact, replacing the drop-down list of pre-determined padding periods with a toggle switch for early/late, plus a keyed-in field of XX:YY minutes/seconds would make me happy.

OK - happier.

[TomXP411]

And what happens when your show starts early one day? I've found that show starts are not usually second-accurate, especially on different channels. That's why I use 2 minute padding.

[Cal]

If you truly just want 7 seconds. Then change the clock on your computer. A lot of clock sync programs can do an offset to true time.

Personally I use a global pad of 2 min. Works great.

edit.
err. Global pad of 2 min in BTV. I like my computer clock to be true.

[Fickey]

If your problem stems from the HTPC waking from hibernation/standby/sleep, there is an option in the web admin for how far in advance of a recording to wake the PC. The default works fine for me.

[rothe]

Every program that I regularly record actually DOES start on time, to the second. Really. Maybe that's because most of my recording is from PBS stations, where commercials aren't constantly fudging things up. Regardless, this is why I used the word "consistently" in my original post to describe a seven second delay to start programs.

My system's clock is dead accurate, because I reset it every day via a scheduled task. I'm not aware of any NTP applet that allows for an offset of a few seconds.

And standby/hibernate wake-up times are not the issue either.

I don't want two minutes worth of padding, or even one minute. I want a more granular setting.

[bit_bit]

IMHO the beyond tv must control this feature; if we say it to record from 9:00 to 10:00 it must start record at 9:00; the problem is that it start the setup for this record at 9:00;

i think that "start X seconds early" is not a solution, because sometimes is 7 seconds, sometimes is 6 seconds, sometimes is 4 seconds; and if you have more than one card, this time could be big; so, my opinion is that the beyond tv must start record at 9:00; (but...i think that is not a very interesting feature for the "big world )

[rothe]

Originally Posted by bit_bit

IMHO the beyond tv must control this feature; if we say it to record from 9:00 to 10:00 it must start record at 9:00; the problem is that it start the setup for this record at 9:00;

i think that "start X seconds early" is not a solution, because sometimes is 7 seconds, sometimes is 6 seconds, sometimes is 4 seconds; and if you have more than one card, this time could be big; so, my opinion is that the beyond tv must start record at 9:00; (but...i think that is not a very interesting feature for the "big world )

It seems that you completely misunderstood what I was proposing.

I don't want to disable BTV's capability to control padding times. I want MORE GRANULAR control. Something more than the drop-down list of +/- X minutes, but rather to be able to type in the number of minutes and ALSO THE NUMBER OF SECONDS.

[GeorgeH]

I think BeyondTV uses seconds for some time measures. It should be possible to set padding in seconds using some effort.

[Rich A]

Originally Posted by rothe

Every program that I regularly record actually DOES start on time, to the second. Really. Maybe that's because most of my recording is from PBS stations, where commercials aren't constantly fudging things up. Regardless, this is why I used the word "consistently" in my original post to describe a seven second delay to start programs.

My system's clock is dead accurate, because I reset it every day via a scheduled task. I'm not aware of any NTP applet that allows for an offset of a few seconds.

And standby/hibernate wake-up times are not the issue either.

I don't want two minutes worth of padding, or even one minute. I want a more granular setting.

I used to have some minor problems with timiing. And I too was updating the pc's clock every 24 hours. However when I randomly checked between updates the clock was off up to 2 or 3 seconds. (until the next update)

I purchased and installed a utility called "Atom Time" which I now have set to update my clock every FOUR hours. And now, no matter when BTV wants to start a recording, it is spot on. I've tested every hour for 24 hours between one a day updates. And it would loose time until the update. Testing between four hour updates and the time was never off enough for me to see any difference.

[rothe]

My problem is not that the PC's clock drifts - it does, by a few seconds per day, but I make a point of correcting it via a scheduled task every day, several minutes ahead of most of my scheduled recordings. So by the time the first of the day's recordings starts, the PC clock is accurate to fractions of a second.

Bottom line is that resetting the clock is not what I want or need. I want more detail to the padding adjustments.

[enigma9o7]

rothe, just fyi, I completely understand what you're saying. Just make it so we can set the pad times and start times to whatever we want, not just # of minutes. In your case, you wanna start 7 seconds early. This change would allow me to pad 35 seconds or 2:39 if I so choose. Seems like it'd be easy for them to implement this too.

[rothe]

Thanks for chiming in. I was starting to get a little discouraged by this thread - most everyone that had anything to say either couldn't allow for someone wanting an improvement that wouldn't benefit them, or just plain old couldn't wrap their head around the issue that I was describing.

It's so simple: change the interface for padding control to allow for [plus/minus] [minutes:seconds].

[Rich A]

I "think" I understand now? You want to be able to change the padding down to the second - Right? We can now set either or both the start / stop time by the minute .. but I've also seen a need to "fine tune" it down to the second. Is that what you're looking for?

[rothe]

Correct.

[rothe]

BTW, Rich, re: that Atom Time utility that you purchased - you probably didn't have to spend any money to get your time synced up properly. It's too late for you to save that twelve bucks, but for the rest of the world, here's what I did....

Windows XP (and I presume 2K and Vista) has a command line utility called W32TM. I created a batch file with the following single-line command:

w32tm /resync

Then I added a scheduled task (via Windows Controls Panel / Scheduled Tasks) that called that batch file every day at about 5:25 pm, just prior to the first of my evening's recordings. This assures that the time is set properly, to within a tenth of a second usually, every day. Even though my PC's clock drifts by a few seconds per day - just like most do, BTW - it only gets a chance to drift by a fraction of a second within my recording period.

Hmmm... perhaps calling a routine like this would be yet another feature that Snapstream could add to BTV.