recording consecutive episodes as one single event and built-in editing tool

GreyzardBigME

TVheadend seems to works fine, except maybe (not even always) with consecutive episodes: if i set a pre and post recording "surplus" the recording of the first episode starts as many minutes i choosed in the settings, while the second and eventually other consecutive episodes are cut at the beginning and/or end (one or more), i whant to suggest a "marathon recording" option that consider consecutive episodes as only one, big recording, possibly with the ability to add "bookmarks" that helps find the starting and ending for all of them, maybe even a built-in tool to manually edit the finished recordings or, if not possible, what are the best software and/or settings to do so without quality loss and desyncing?

DeltaMikeCharlie

GreyzardBigME "marathon recording"

I really like this idea. I have built a similar feature for a now-defunct PVR system many many years ago. The main problem I see at the moment is the EPG. You need to keep an EPG entry for each episode so that: 1) you know what you've recorded and 2) you can navigate a little better between episodes.

I still need to think about it some more. Perhaps build a playlist from a group of recordings or something. Maybe set a chain of recordings to 'autoplay' once the previous recording is complete.

TVH can already have multiple files in each recording, perhaps something could be done with that existing feature. Have 'child' recordings that are real and then a 'parent' recording that lists all of its children's files as part of its recording.

Cue points on a single recording file is also a possibility.

GreyzardBigME while the second and eventually other consecutive episodes are cut at the beginning and/or end (one or more)

This should not be happening if each scheduled recording has pre/post padding. Is there continuity between that previous/next episodes? Is there a gap or does episode 2 pick up immediately where episode 1 stopped?

DeltaMikeCharlie

Firstly, to manage expectations, if I decide to pursue this, due to upcoming personal commitments, I will not be able to commence programming work on this feature until October 2025 at the earliest.

Some more thoughts.....

I think that to begin with, this feature should be added to the 'DVR Profiles' object. This will allow the feature to apply to specific individual recordings or to recordings created by the 'Autorec' feature. It also means that these recordings can be stored in a specific location if required.

The feature should have a name that clearly denotes its function like 'Join consecutive events', "Merge consecutive recordings' or similar.

After a new recording is scheduled that is attached to a DVR profile that has this feature enabled, TVH will search for existing scheduled recordings that are consecutive and/or overlapping on the same channel as the recording that has just been created. If more multiple scheduled recordings are identified, a new 'parent' recording will be created spanning all of the 'child' recordings.

Perhaps if there is a small (configurable) gap between recordings, they could still be considered to be 'continuous'. Consider a condition like: Event One – One Minute News Break – Event Two, etc.

Parent and child recordings will be linked via their UUIDs. A 'child' will have a field for a single 'parent' UUID and a parent will have an array for multiple 'child' UUIDs.

When it comes time to record, the 'child' recordings will not be recorded, only the 'parent' will be physically recorded. For a 'child' recording, a hard link to the 'parent' recording file will be made and attached to the child. The 'parent' will have cue points for the beginning of each 'child' and each 'child' will have cue points for their segment of the 'parent' recording.

As not all file systems support 'hard links' some further consideration may be required. However, using hard links allows for parents and children to be deleted individually with the recording file only being deleted one all parent/children recordings have been deleted.

This sounds a little complicated, but it should mean that clients (like Kodi) should be able to access either the whole sequence or individual segments without needing to change the existing protocols.

With the 'parent', the EPG metadata will need to be updated so that it contains an amalgamation of the metadata from all of the 'children'. The title would have to indicate that this was a multi-event recording and the description would need to contain the original title/sub-title/description for all of the child events.

One enhancement could be to add a parent/child relationship at the dvr profile level. That way parents/children could be stored in different places with or without their own recording files or pointing to the parent. DVR profiles with no nominated parent profile would just use the same details as the child profile for the parent recording. Unfortunately, this could further complicate the 'hard link' issue.

DeltaMikeCharlie

DeltaMikeCharlie a new 'parent' recording will be created spanning all of the 'child' recordings.

Curiously, TVH already has a parent/child concept for DVR entries.

tvheadend/tvheadendblob/c0c55c7838ae505c04e90be16da9919b6d49a146/src/dvr/dvr_db.c#L4704C1-L4721C7

More investigation is required. . . . .

DaveH

A more natural idea seems to me for the system to record the first episode as a file, and then to record the second episode as a second file, and so on. The difference to the current behaviour would be that if necessary it duplicates the recording from the end of the first episode at the beginning of the second episode. It uses the EPG times and lead-in lead-out times to determine when the episodes start and stop.

I have no idea how difficult this would be to implement! 🙂

DeltaMikeCharlie

DaveH It uses the EPG times and lead-in lead-out times to determine when the episodes start and stop.

A practical and pragmatic alternative to my grandiose scheme. TVH already supports edl files so it should be possible to use that mechanism to create a scene marker denoting the beginning and end of the event within the actual recording based on the EPG metadata.

This would make a good first step and yield practical advantages to everyday users whilst laying the groundwork for future development. I still think that a methodology using a single recording file with multiple scene markers has merit. Being able to watch the whole 'marathon' in a single uninterrupted sitting would also have its benefits.

DeltaMikeCharlie

DaveH I have no idea how difficult this would be to implement! 🙂

I did an experiment where I manually created an edl file for a recording that I had made. I tagged a single EPG event to record, but added enough post-padding to ensure that the entire following EPG event was also covered with some padding as follows:

Recording starts: 09:39:12 (150 seconds pre-padding + warm up)
First Event: 09:41:42 to 09:54:33 (771 seconds)
Second Event: 09:54:33 to 10:00:03 (330 seconds)
Recording Ends: 10:04:33 (270 seconds post-padding)

My manual edl file ended up looking like this:

0 150 2
150 921 2
921 1251 2

When playing this recording via Kodi, the following cutpoints were shown: 02:30 (150 seconds), 15:20 (920 seconds) and 20:50 (1250 seconds). Apart from the 1 second discrepancy for the middle event, it all seemed to work well.

Kodi uses a specific HTSP command to obtain the list of cutpoints.

https://docs.tvheadend.org/documentation/development/htsp/client-to-server-rpc-methods#getdvrcutpoints

From the documentation that I have reviewed so far, this is the only place that cutpoints are used. If a recording were to be streamed via HTTP, there would need to be some way to include the cutpoints in the m3u file for this feature to be useful.

From this experiment, I concluded that:

This feature only currently appears to be of value to Kodi users.
That single and multi-event cutpoints within a recordings is feasible.

To implement this for a single-event recording, a new parameter could be added to the DVR Profile to indicate that an edl file should be created. Once the recording has been completed, TVH should evaluate the recording start time, EPG event start time, EPG event finish time and the recording finish time in order to calculate the timings to be written into edl file.

It should be noted that this feature will depend on the accuracy of the EPG data provided by the broadcaster and would not involve any analysis of when the recorded event actually started or ended.

GreyzardBigME

i didn't listed my configuration:
Raspberry Pi 4 - 2GB
Argon NEO case
External Raid Enclosure Hamlet (only one disk)
Xbox ONE TV Tuner

apparently, pre and post padding is not necessary with "Supernatural" because there is always some commercial both at the beginnind and end of every episode included in the EPG scheduled time, similar thing with "Doctor Quinn - medicine woman" (la signora del west in italy) but today i still got the ending of the first episode cut at the very end (sometimes, theiy're aired literally one after another, without even a commercial in between), luckily the cut episode already aired the day before and it's fine; this specific scenario is the one that gave me the idea of the "multiple episodes as single recording"