Sweep up great TV in May
May 10th, 2006 at 4:05 pm by zack
Sweeps month has arrived once again, and with it many great hours of season finales and special shows.
I have many emotions with the shows in the upcoming weeks. Excitement as I wait to see “How How I met Your Mother” and “Unan1mous” close out the season. Sadness to see the “West Wing” end, as it has been one of my favorite shows over the past few years. And indifference as “Desperate Housewifes” concludes a less than stellar sophomore season. Between the best and the worst shows, there will also be a number of great episodes as the networks vie for great ratings. House, Lost and Prison Break are sure to pull out all of the stops, while Alias closes out it’s five year run.
When scheduling your shows to record, make sure to watch out for odd starting or ending times. These times can cause conflicts that could cause your shows to record.
The easiest way to alleviate this problem is to install a second (or third or tenth) tuner card available from the SnapStream Store.
While you wait for the UPS man to bring your new toy however, you can still use the recording features of Beyond TV to make sure you don’t miss any shows. For example, say you want to record both CSI at 8 and then the new episode of ER at 9. Since ER starts at 8:59, it would normally not record since CSI would still be recording.
To fix this, schedule the episode of ER to record from the Viewscape SnapStream.net Guide and then click again on the show. Choose “View and Edit Details” and change “Start This Recording” to “1 Minute Late”.
Then you can schedule CSI and it will be able to record without conflict. Using the same method, you could also choose to stop CSI one minute early.
For a full list of finales, check out the Baltimore Sun article with a full rundown..
May 11th, 2006 at 9:00 am
I would think that this would be a good candidate for an automatic warning, kind of the way Outlook warns you that you’ve booked two meetings back to back. The warning dialog could allow you to select which program to edit the recording details for and once you’ve made your selection, you won’t have to take the additional step of manually going to the view and edit details screen.
It’s a good feature, but it could be better. I’m thinking about ways to improve your WAF.
May 11th, 2006 at 11:20 am
BTV needs a conflict management screen much like what BTV Negociator offers. The problem with this blog article is that it assumes you’ll go out of your way to discover those conflicts and fix them. Well, BTV doesn’t always tell you of those so you’re on a witch hunt.
May 12th, 2006 at 11:25 am
At the very least I think when you encounter the conflict management screen a combination with automatically generated overlap management TV program combination should be one of the choices
May 19th, 2006 at 7:27 pm
A bit off topic, but what happened to the living room showcases?
June 29th, 2006 at 1:21 am
i don’t know