Formula 1

[Pete77]

Recording the red button (301) would be great, although I use VM TiVo to record the F1 in HD these days.

Surely your VM TIvo can't manage to record the F1 Forum though can it? Or does it have a channel number on a Virgin Tivo?

[mrtickle]

Predictably those who like everything have been completely selfish and are trying to deny those of us who like to only record the race the opportunity to do this because as total F1holics they seem totally unable to conceive why anyone would not have another three hours a week to give to the cause.

The BBC has just gone to the trouble from the start of this season of splitting the race in to a different program from the qualifying after originally only having had one program name for everything. In my view it would be an extremely retrograde step if the AltEPG tried to circumvent this.

I think you are being totally unfair in your criticism here. Graham went to some length to solicit opinion on this topic and until your post no one had expressed any preference for keeping the three series separate. You are of course welcome to your opinion but please don't accuse those who are investing considerable time in getting the altepg service up and running of being selfish or evil.

I agree, and stand by my opinion that It's preferable to delete from ToDo than to have to set up multiple SPs.

[Pete77]

I agree, and stand by my opinion that It's preferable to delete from ToDo than to have to set up multiple SPs.

So you have to set up Multiple SPs only the once but those of us who only want to record the race would have to delete 40 items from the ToDo list a year in 20 different weeks. So I take it that your suggestion is preferable only for those who like to record absolutely everything F1 and obviously have much more recording capacity than just the standard 40 hours available in their machines to be able to do that.

A possible compromise would be for all programs to just have the title and Season Pass of"Formula 1" but for the episode description for the Race to be F1 Race Live compared to F1 Qualifying and F1 Highlights. Those of us only wanting the race could then set up a keyword wishlist for just "F1 Race Live" and not have any Season Passes set.

[mrtickle]

I agree, and stand by my opinion that It's preferable to delete from ToDo than to have to set up multiple SPs.

So you have to set up Multiple SPs only the once but those of us who only want to record the race would have to delete 40 items from the ToDo list a year in 20 different weeks. So I take it that your suggestion is preferable only for those who like to record absolutely everything F1

Well "absolutely everything" is an exaggeration, it's two programmes isn't it. The highlights programme is on another channel. Yes, given the choice of a user missing a programme they might have wanted or having too much in the ToDo list, the latter is the lesser of the two evils. Thought I'd made my view clear.

[Pete77]

Yes, given the choice of a user missing a programme they might have wanted or having too much in the ToDo list, the latter is the lesser of the two evils. Thought I'd made my view clear.

What if they only have a 40 hour non upgraded Tivo and recording F1 Qualifying as well as F1 Race leaves them with insufficient space to record other programs while they are away on holiday for 2 weeks. We are talking about an SP here that can pick up more than 6 hours of recordings per week.

Why not admit that you only care about what is actually convenient for you.

On a much more positive note the AltEPG guys have now added listings for Freeview channel 301 making it possible to record the F1 Forum on your Tivo from a Freeview box for the first time. And this program does already have its own name of F1 Forum and hence its own Season Pass and/or its own Wishlist options.

[Tcm2007]

On a much more positive note the AltEPG guys have now added listings for Freeview channel 301 making it possible to record the F1 Forum on your Tivo from a Freeview box for the first time. And this program does already have its own name of F1 Forum and hence its own Season Pass and/or its own Wishlist options.

What's that Pete? AltEPG better the Tribune data you say? Who saw that coming, eh?

[mrtickle]

Why not admit that you only care about what is actually convenient for you.

Pot, kettle, black.

[ghstone]

So a new season and new provider for F1 coverage. The Last few years have been excellent, and I really can't see how Sky can match it.

And, as I don't have Sky, just 'FreeSat from Sky' and 'FreeSat', and won't entertain paying > £30/month for a Sky package + Sky Sports in order to see ~ 10 F1 races, I'll soon be putting up another satellite feed; Well actually I may get somebody who knows what thy're doing to put it up, I'll just connect the box and cables - so I can get European channels which do show the race Live and FTA.

Is anyone else going down the same route ?

If so, is it possible to get limited EPG data for the channel(s) which will show it into TIVO - either automatically or by loading to my networked Tivos from a PC ?

Obviously I could set them manually, but it would be nice to have some automation, and of course programe data.

Graham

[mrtickle]

We can't support non-Freesat/non-Sky satellite unfortunately. It's proving hard enough to get a few days of data for the limited channels we do cover! This was covered on the forum the other day when someone bought a FTA box instead of a Freesat(tm) box.

Add to that the problem with IR codes etc.

However I don't understand your thought process anyway! You don't want to wait for the BBC highlights later in the day (which we will have guide data for) for those 10 races, and you feel so strongly about it that you would buy extra equipment to be able to get them live - yet you want to timeshift/record those races and not bother to watch them live? Or have I misunderstood. For me, live sport is the only TV that I watch live now. With F1 there's the live timing on www.formula1.com which demands you watch live, and through Aux bypass too - the delay caused by the live buffer is too great. I do have a Season Pass but ended up watching the whole thing on Aux bypass.

It's possible to roll your own guide data slices but you'll also have to create your own set of IR codes for that STB. It's doable, there are some threads here where people have captured IR codes with a script on the tivo.

[ghstone]

Ah, I was going to use a Freesat box and manually tuned it, so IR should work....

We do watch all the races almost Live, but we watch the recording so we can pause /rewind / skip (in the days of adverts). For the BBC ones I'll watch it on the Humax HDR, so we get full HD. BUT I always have a backup recording on TIVO, and we flip the satellite Tivo is recording from to the Red Button so we get the forum as well.

I'm not interested in watching highlights unless something goes horribly wrong with the full recordings and rhat's my only option - I've never understood why people watch football matches when they already know the result !

The Live timing on the web is interesting for Qualifying, but for the race I'm generally happy with the the quality of the BBC coverage - for this year though, for some of them it'll be RTL + Radio 5 Live, so we'll see.

Thanks for the feedback anyway, and you've given me another idea - set the new Satellite box to RTL or whatever, and tell Tivo to record off SKY F1... Tivo won't chnage the channel but the coverage is the same for all TV stations anyway, as it's provided by F1.

Graham

[mrtickle]

You should see from today that Sky Sports F1 had been added. This was pure luck, it was added to our source feed so we were able to add it.

[Milhouse]

For the Sky (and possibly BBC) showings, is there any way to differentiate the actual race from Qualifying and Practice?

Perhaps bizarrely, I only want to record the race and I'm not so interested in the practice or qualifying, however I'm yet to determine an advanced wishlist that will work for this situation as ignoring Qualifying and Practice keywords (thumb down on both) seems to include both.

These are the descriptions for the Practice, Qualifying and race - if a unique keyword could be added to the race description that would help a great deal:

2012 Australian Grand Prix: First Practice
2012 Australian Grand Prix: Second Practice
2012 Australian Grand Prix: Final Practice
2012 Australian Grand Prix Qualifying
2012 Australian Grand Prix

For example, if the actual race had a description of "2012 Australian Grand Prix Race" then perhaps it would be possible to add a mandatory keyword of "Grand Prix Race" which would then ignore Qualifying and Practice.

[mrtickle]

That's a reasonable idea, although deleting from the to-do list is ALWAYS going to be far more reliable than hoping the right thing appears to match a Wishlist. For that reason I personally would not want to trust the Wishlist if I was a viewer, and I definitely don't want to be responsible for having to remember to hand-fix the data in such a way, knowing that someone is relying on such a Wishlist, because of the sheer quantity of other guide data every day. Keeping a basic service going is far too much work already without nice cool things like that

Last year there were only two BBC1 programmes each race, the practice sessions were on red button so didn't appear in the Season Pass so the issue didn't really arise.

It needs someone to manually edit it every time. Someone who recently joined as an Editor perhaps (hint!) may want to add "Race" each time?

This is what we've got for this weekend:
2012 Australian Grand Prix: First Practice
2012 Australian Grand Prix: Second Practice
2012 Australian Grand Prix: Third Practice
2012 Australian Grand Prix: Final Practice
2012 Australian Grand Prix Qualifying
Australian Grand Prix Qualifying Highlights
2012 Australian Grand Prix
Australian Grand Prix
2012 Australian Grand Prix: Highlights

The ones that don't start "2012" are the BBC programmes. I gave them season and episode numbers in a desperate attempt to sort the list, otherwise it's a nightmare to wade through. Note that Sky aren't even consistent, there's no colon in the Qualifying programme title.

There's no guarantee that they'll carry on the same. Last year all the BBC ones had a standard format:
The X Grand Prix Live (sometimes with, sometimes without a separator hyphen)
The X Grand Prix Re-run

[Milhouse]

That's a reasonable idea, although deleting from the to-do list is ALWAYS going to be far more reliable than hoping the right thing appears to match a Wishlist. For that reason I personally would not want to trust the Wishlist if I was a viewer, and I definitely don't want to be responsible for having to remember to hand-fix the data in such a way, knowing that someone is relying on such a Wishlist, because of the sheer quantity of other guide data every day. Keeping a basic service going is far too much work already without nice cool things like that

Last year there were only two BBC1 programmes each race, the practice sessions were on red button so didn't appear in the Season Pass so the issue didn't really arise.

Fair enough - I guess I was hoping that there may be a mechanism planned (or being thought about) that could update descriptions according to some basic rules but appreciate this is more effort and just icing on the cake.

It needs someone to manually edit it every time. Someone who recently joined as an Editor perhaps (hint!) may want to add "Race" each time?

Ha, OK I'll give it a go.

This is what we've got for this weekend:
2012 Australian Grand Prix: First Practice
2012 Australian Grand Prix: Second Practice
2012 Australian Grand Prix: Third Practice
2012 Australian Grand Prix: Final Practice
2012 Australian Grand Prix Qualifying
Australian Grand Prix Qualifying Highlights
2012 Australian Grand Prix
Australian Grand Prix
2012 Australian Grand Prix: Highlights

The ones that don't start "2012" are the BBC programmes. I gave them season and episode numbers in a desperate attempt to sort the list, otherwise it's a nightmare to wade through. Note that Sky aren't even consistent, there's no colon in the Qualifying programme title.

There's no guarantee that they'll carry on the same. Last year all the BBC ones had a standard format:
The X Grand Prix Live (sometimes with, sometimes without a separator hyphen)
The X Grand Prix Re-run

I'll try and append the "Race" suffix to the BBC and Sky races in future, unless anyone has any objections.

[mrtickle]

Fair enough - I guess I was hoping that there may be a mechanism planned (or being thought about) that could update descriptions according to some basic rules but appreciate this is more effort and just icing on the cake.

Oops, yes I forgot that part. There are (well not for descriptions, but yes for episode titles) - but it needs consistent incoming data for it to work well. When it does work, it means less effort in the long run which is a good thing. Tomorrow we'll have next Sunday's Sky F1 data to have a look at and we'll know a bit more! We can set a rule that says stuff like "any incoming episode on a Sunday on channel X - give it title Y" which is how we do things like the soaps omnibus editions and Newsnight episode titles. That wouldn't be too far off what we need but for the possible endings (highlights, re-run, or blank).