Comments on: Add-In Review: Recorded TV Manager Part 2

By: Marie

Marie — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:04:19 +0000

I think that is worth buying.. it's just 25$ and you can record it in a good quality. Thanks for the great review ! Have a nice day to you.

By: Jim_Clark

Jim_Clark — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 23:42:40 +0000

End of Rick's comments

By: Jim_Clark

Jim_Clark — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 23:41:59 +0000

Re: Wish List

•All-in-one install. Me too, but it’s not easy and beyond my current resources.
•Commercial remover. I have a plan for that going forward. AutoCopy is implemented as rule-based system so that I can add new rule types. I’m planning a new rule type which acts as a front end to Power Shell. “Copy to this folder, then run my commercial removal program, then copy the result to my WHS”. That would be a Power Shell script invoked from an AutoCopy rule, with different rules for different skip programs or other things.

By: Jim_Clark

Jim_Clark — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 23:41:42 +0000

The key to making that work is AutoDelete, which you didn’t discuss. Media Center is set to record every episode of all the series I’m collecting and Recorded TV Manager AutoCopy will move them to the collection disk. The cable broadcasts will run in broadcast order and then restart from the beginning, so it may take a while to collect a series. While you are collecting, trying to fill in missing episodes, Media Center will record a lot of “duplicate” episodes, i.e. the same episode recorded on a different date. Recorded TV Manager AutoDelete will automatically delete the duplicate episodes immediately, “under the radar”, so to speak, and you never see them. Probably one of the more important and useful functions in Recorded TV Manager.

By: Jim_Clark

Jim_Clark — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 23:41:28 +0000

As a member of the “baby boom” generation, cable TV offers me a plethora of programming from my younger days and a lot of programming from recent years that I never was able to watch. So I collect stuff I’m interested in seeing to a pair of 300GB disks on an XP machine on the network. I have another XP Media Center machine which records 24/7 all of the shows that I’m collecting, whenever they are broadcast, and Recorded TV Manager automatically moves them to the collection disk. The collection disk is not in my “watched” folder list in MC, so they don’t show up in Recorded TV in MC, but you can access them through “Browse” in my MC add-in. Currently, in addition to current programming, I’m watching The Sopranos, Hogan’s Heroes, The Twilight Zone, and The X-Files. I’m also collecting, but not watching, Invasion, Jeremiah, Jericho, Leverage, ReGenesis, and The Cleaner, all of which I’ll watch when I get the complete sets. Plus, I collect NCIS and Bones for my wife. Granted, not trivial to set up, but not that hard and then it just works without any intervention.

By: Jim_Clark

Jim_Clark — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 23:41:07 +0000

I think that the piece that you missed is collecting, which I define as collecting a series until you have all the episodes, or at least the first few seasons. That way, you can watch the series from the beginning which is usually very important to understanding the show/characters/premise, etc. (Original air date is another thing that Recorded TV Manager has provided that Microsoft has finally added.) And, I’m not really talking about current programming where you are consuming shortly after recording, sometimes getting behind a few episodes, but not really collecting.

By: Jim_Clark

Jim_Clark — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 23:40:42 +0000

I just received this email from Rick and got his permission to add his email comments here. If you like what you see, and want new features added, now is the time to try out this software for yourself and support Rick.

Thanks again for your hard work and for taking the time to actually try the software. I appreciate your comments. As I have said previously, if all one wants to do is automatically copy recordings to the WHS and watch them through the MC interface, then, with PP3 and Win7 you can now do that “out of the box”. Recorded TV Manager has offered that functionality for the last four years and the basic (local) AutoMove functionality is now part of the client application, which is free. Myself, I’m very dependent on the client app because I have a large and changing collection of recordings (600-700).

continued…

By: Jim_Clark

Jim_Clark — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:40:08 +0000

Yes, this review probably took longer than any previous HW or SW review I have done. I hope I have done justice to the program in the limited time I have been using TV Manager.

That said, I feel that this is the kind of program where the benifits become more apparent the longer one uses it and as one adds more data (recorded shows). I could not imagine using WMC to sift thru 100's of recorded programs without the enhanced database capabilities of TV Manager.

By: WHS-Newbie

WHS-Newbie — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 13:32:25 +0000

A lot of hard work and time in this article, thank you for the information and hard work, most appreciated.