Timeshifting sports- How do you know when the game's over?

[Muse]

I know this will garner some smartass comments. I guess that goes with the territory. 😀 I've been timeshifting sports for many years and there's generally a serious issue being how to determine if a game is over. If you tune in and see if it's still on, there's a fairly good chance you will discover the outcome, thereby ruining your enjoyment. If it's a football game, no problemo - they're pretty damn predictable in length. Same with basketball. But baseball is anybody's guess. I got this idea last night that somebody should put up a notice on their website that such and such game is over, it's now the time to stop your recording. Hell, it would even be theoretically possible to have a recording device be informed of the end of the contest! Whoa! Has Tivo done that? That would be a good selling factor.😎:roll::laugh:😕:evil::frown::disgust:

 

[purbeast0]

dude, wtf are you talking about?

 

[gigapet]

Originally posted by: purbeast0
dude, wtf are you talking about?

 

[blackdogdeek]

replaytv does NOT know when your show is over. it will stop recording when the scheduled end of the show occurs.

i can't remember if tivo was smart enough to continue recording till the show was over or not but i seem to think it was.

i don't know if there is an actual marker you can pick up that signals the end of a particular show, but that's all it would take to code the solution yourself.

 

[Snapster]

Start time of game + (length of a game period * number of periods) + advert time + extra/injury/overtime = end of game.

 

[Muse]

Ah, regarding predictable football and basketball. I forgot about those darn overtime games! Argh....:|:Q:roll:

 

[d0ofy]

Just set the VCR to record 6 hours for a baseball game. That should cover 9 innings of an ALCS game.

 

[oboeguy]

I don't get it, can't you watch it while it's recording too? (I mean with TiVo-type things) Start watching it about half-way through the expected time and you should be fine, right?

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: oboeguy
I don't get it, can't you watch it while it's recording too? (I mean with TiVo-type things) Start watching it about half-way through the expected time and you should be fine, right?

Uh, yeah that works when you are in a position to do that. Let me describe this:

You need Tivo style capabilities to do this. This could be TiVo itself, or a similar device. It could also be two different recorders, such as a couple of SVHS decks, which is the way I used to do this. I'd start recording the event with one deck, come back an hour or two later and start recording with the second deck and start watching on the first. When I finished watching this recording on the first deck, I'd start recording the event again on the first deck, stop the second deck and start watching the recording it had just made. When done watching that, I'd stop the first deck's recording again, and proceed in this fashion until I've seen the whole event. If you are careful enough you can timeshift the event this way, forward through the commercials and tiptoe across the minefield of not inadvertently discovering the score by accidentally viewing some live TV. Many times I've been blown up in that minefield, but I know what to be careful of now.

However, I'm now making HDTV recordings with a device that's incapable of timeshifting in the sense of watching a show/event while in progress. Thus, you want to give the whole thing a safe cushion (like no baseball game could possibly go over 6 hours, right? Right???). But that means you can't start watching until 6 hours have elapsed, or whatever you deem a safe judgment of the longest it's apt to be. That's a pain, of course. It would be so much nicer if there were some way to find out that the game was over without the possibility of finding out anything whatsoever about how the game went, and I mean anything!I'm quite sure that there are many other people besides me who would appreciate that facility. I wonder if exists, in fact, since it's a not uncommon need and it wouldn't be very hard to fulfill. A network, something like the website for ESPN, or similar, could have a page for that very purpose. Feasible. In fact, I think it's not entirely implausible that such a facility exists. That's why I started this thread.