Is it possible to limit recordings across two drives?

[CupOfCheese]

Hello. I have been trying to switch from WMC because of this issue, but then I thought I would ask around here to see if there is a solution.

I am recording to my local drive. Every night, I have a scheduled task that moves the recordings to a large RAID array. (Don't want to record direct due to increased power consumption and drive wear) When I tell WMC to look on my local drive and my network drive for recordings, it does, but the "limit number of episodes" feature only counts shows on the recording drive, and disregards episodes on the network location. Is there ANY way to fix this? Even creative workarounds would be appreciated.

Thanks,
CupOfCheese

[Space]

Could you not have the scheduled task check how many episode you have on the RAID array and only copy over new episodes if that number is < the max_amount allowed? You can then set the Series to only "keep", for example, 2 episodes, so you will never have more than 2 + max_amount episodes at any one time (you can also have your task just delete the new episodes if you already have max_amount on the array). This assumes that you will run your scheduled task often enough to copy over newly recorded episodes before WMC attempts to record more than "keep" # of episodes. Of course this method would require you to have your scheduled task be smart enough to discover the correct recordings on the array and count them. It would also have WMC continue to record all episodes even if you have max_amount on the array (they will just be deleted), so is not very efficient.

To be honest, I have never use the "keep" functionality in WMC, so I have no idea how or even if it works.

[CupOfCheese]

That's not a bad idea, just very difficult to implement since WMC doesn't put recordings in their own folders by show. If it did, then it would be easy. Having a script go by filename is very tricky because filenames change. For instance, you might have Storage Wars, and Storage Wars: Texas. Two different shows. It almost would work, but not quite. I appreciate your feedback!!!

[Space]

I don't think it's that tricky. Everything up to the first underscore ("_") is the show name.

Example:

Code: Select all

Storage Wars_A&EHD_2016_05_10_22_00_02.wtv
Storage Wars- Texas_A&EHD_2015_02_11_22_30_03.wtv

If an underscore is in the actual name of the show, then WMC will probably convert it to another character (for instance, here the ":" in "Storage Wars: Texas" is converted to a "-")

It is possible to have a movie that has the same name as a TV show, however, so that is a possible issue.

[adam1991]

WMC's "limit number of episodes" automatically deletes the OLDEST shows (by recording date) when it records new shows. The proposed idea would do the opposite--simply not copy newer shows to the RAID, but instead delete them.

The scheduled task, to mimic WMC (which I think I prefer), would have to check the number of shows on the RAID, then if it's at a max number it would have to find the oldest and delete it. If you can achieve this, that mimics WMC with even more flexibility than WMC has in defining the number of shows to keep.

But that wouldn't work to mimic WMC's capability of managing the same show that's playing at different times and being recorded as such. For example, I have three instances of The Big Bang Theory defined to record: 6pm (new & reruns on channel 28), 730pm (new & reruns on channel 28), and 8pm (new only on CBS only). Despite them all having the same name, WMC knows them as three separate recording items because of time. I have each of them set to keep 10 recordings. The result is a single Big Bang Theory entry in the WMC list that has 30 recordings in it, among them the latest 10 newest BBTs.

To achieve that in your RAID scheme would require digging into the metadata instead of using filenames, which I believe ultimately you'll end up doing anyway once you start going further into managing your recordings like this.