reserve space for Suggestions

It would be nuts to have your programs deleting in order to save room for suggestions or deleted shows. The point of suggestions and deleted shows are if there's room available for more than just what you've recorded, then great; if not, oh well!

 

I think almost everyone (with the exception of you apparently) would be royally pissed if shows they actually requested were deleted in order to record a suggestion. Most of us watch (or plan to watch) the shows we've asked to have recorded. At the point where I no longer plan on watching them, I delete them.

 

I'm sure jakerock brought it up because the only time reserving space for suggestions would let you to have more suggestions is when it causes some non-suggestion to deleted first.

If non-suggestions hadn't "filled up my hard drive" the TiVo would have plenty of room for suggestions and the reserved space would have no effect. But if the drive filled up enough to hit that reserved point then the only way it can keep a suggestion, or record a new one, is to delete some non-suggestion. Sure that may be unlikely to happen, but that's just another way of saying your request is unlikely to have an effect. But still the only possible effect it can have is to cause a non-suggestion to be deleted in preference to a suggestion. (Actually that's not true, if you used "keep until I delete" exclusively your idea could cause a non-suggestion to fail to record in order to keep a suggestion)



As for saying the drive has lots of space, I still need to be careful around the Olympics when there is often 40+ hours of coverage a day for a couple of weeks. Even a few TB drive can run out of space fast if you don't review and delete that programming every day or so. (Stupid NBC hiding the 30 minutes of coverage I want in the middle of a 6 hour block )

 

Actually it isn't. I'm deleting non-suggestions once I'm done with them (usually from the handy pop-up at the end of the show asking if I want to keep or delete).

So there are plenty of hours of space available for suggestions. Reserving some would do nothing (for me); except on the rare occasions where I screwed up and it deleted a non-suggestion before a suggestion.

I've had TiVos for years and I can probably count the number of times it deleted a show, due to lack of space, on one hand.


Now I guess if your habit was just to leave watched shows on the TiVo until the drive filled up I could see why someone might want reserved space. In that scenario they would probably want random suggestions over shows they'd watched and didn't want to watch again. (Basically they'd have at least two catagories of non-suggestions; ones they cared about and ones they didn't -- but don't differentiate them to the TiVo)

 

It's not obvious to you but what you're saying is illogical.

You want to reserve space for suggestions because "You want to have suggestions and you have enough recorded shows that suggestions are not being recorded (or deleted?)." By definition then you're going to lose recorded programs if you were to reserve room for suggestions.

If 1+ TB is so big and you have so much space then you don't need to reserve space, you'll have plenty for suggestions. By saying you need to reserve space, you're saying that what ever drive you have isn't big enough to hold all the recordings you've made plus suggestions. By your own words your argument that it would have no effect is wrong. If reserved space wouldn't affect your recordings then by definition you don't need it - the TiVo uses all space that isn't filled with recordings for suggestions.

 

And in the process delete recordings which you stated that I wouldn't have to worry about that.

I don't have to worry about suggestions not being recorded because I don't fill up the TiVo with unwatched recordings. But if I needed this feature then by definition I would lose them.

 

No, I was saying your setting doesn't do anything except allow the TiVo to delete non-suggestions before suggestions.


Look, lets say your feature is implemented and you reserve 10% of the drive for suggestions (like you said in your earlier post). There are only two scenarios:
1) The drive at less than 90% full with non-suggestions
2) The drive is at 90% full of non-suggestions.

In the former your setting never does anything; the TiVo will use the free space (which exceeds 10%) for suggestions.
In the later the TiVo will delete a non-suggestion to avoid deleting a suggestion; its the only way it can reserve that 10%.[1]



On my TiVo, if I'm using it the way I normally do, I'd always be in scenario 1. But my point was that jackrock was reasonable to talk about deleting non-suggestions first because that's what would happen in scenario 2.



Now under scenario 2 you might prefer a random suggestion over whatever non-suggestion just got deleted, but the TiVo still deleted a non-suggestion to retain room for a suggestion.
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[1] Well unless you're doing 100% KUID, in which case it won't delete anything but will stop recording new non-suggestions. Which is probably worse. But KUID and a full drive is a problem whether or not you've artificially shrunk the main drive size with reserved suggestion room.

 

If your proposal does not delete programs or not record new ones to keep room for suggestions, then how does it reserve space at all? That would cause suggestions to work the way they do today.

 

Exactly. Take his numbers of 900gb or 1Tb aka 135 hrs vs 150 hrs.

Under his proposal what happens when the TiVo tries to record the 136th hour of scheduled content?
Either it deletes an older show to avoid encroaching on the 15 hours of suggestions[1] or it fails to record that new show (if everything was KUID). There's nothing else it could do if it's leaving 15 hours of suggestions.

Presto: suggestions deleting non-suggestions. Or rather, as we've been saying, more accurately deleting non-suggestions rather than suggestions.



That reserving space can cause non-suggestions to delete before suggestions just isn't debatable; that how reserved space has to work -- all you can do is argue the drives are big enough, and the shows deleted would likely be old enough, that most people shouldn't care if they're deleted. (Which actually does seems to be the argument trip1eX is implicitly making; with his references to, in his opinion, a TiVo's vast hours of storage)

I personally think he'd be wrong about that about that, but at least it's debatable. (Heck I've seen people here say they turn off suggestions because they don't like that they cause deleted shows to be removed early from the deleted items folder. That's rating shows you've personally deleted as higher retention priority than random shows Tivo suggests for you!)

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[1] IIRC it deletes the recorded show that's been expired the longest; which it you haven't ever adjusting keep until dates should also be the oldest recording

 

Thanks!

My only follow up- using thumbs makes suggestions better than random. That is why i like them, they use my preferences to guess what other things i may like. It is not perfect, by any means, but I certainly have found great content there that I would otherwise have never seen.

 

A lot of this disagreement stems from trying to ascribe descriptive language (which is necessarily interpretive) to what the scheduler is doing. The OP presented a clear strategy and behavior.

Using the 10% example, you now have 135h for My shows, and Suggestions has a baby 15h. "That's my side, that's your side."

Your shows is now full when at 135h. Within the 135h allocation, nothing gets deleted early. It's exactly like just having a smaller drive. The UI triggers warnings earlier.

Talking about how a new Suggestion would delete something from My Shows early, even if it were technically correct, is not how the model views the world. There could not even be any of Your Shows in the Suggestions allocation.

Now you can argue how porous should the delineation be. Can Suggestions go up to 16h if there were free space? That's what happens now, but the 16th can disappear when needed without notice. No complaints there. Can My Shows ever go up to 136h when Suggestions is blank? No, not without breaking the original feature purpose that there (almost) always have a minimum number of Suggestions be available to watch.

Suggestions replace Suggestions. A New My Show replaces an Old My Show. Suggestions does not replace any My Shows. Letting a New My Show displace Suggestions can lead to clobbering and extinction of any Suggestions, which is why this protected status was proposed.

As an implementation detail, you would in the Settings UI let people set a minimum for Suggestions. Choosing 0 would be the same as turning off, and how it acted before. It wouldn't be a special case (bug ridden) but a tweaking of what the scheduler already does.