Schedchk

DRAFT Schedchk - Check and fix the Humax recording schedule DRAFT

Introduction

While it is "only telly" it can be extremely annoying when we find that a programme we had scheduled to record fails to record correctly. Some failures can be attributed to user errors but a considerable numbers of problems are attributable to the broadcasters and problems in the Humax software not anticipating the ever more creative ways the broadcasters find to make life complicated!

The origins of schedchk go back several years to a forum postwhere I proposed the idea of automatically detecting when programmes were delayed or moved to another channel (e.g. BBC One -> BBC Two) because of overrunning sporting events or breaking news events. Nothing much happened at that time since Wimbledon only last two weeks and other last minute programme changes are by their nature unpredictable making testing difficult.

However now we live in Interesting Times the unpredictable has become routine, every day the BBC1 showing of Pointless is moved to BBC2 to make way for the Corona Virus Daily Update. One might think that after this long the BBC would take the hint and schedule Pointless on BBC2 but no they persist in scheduling it on BBC1 and only update the schedules 3-72 hours in advance! Since Pointless is one of our favourite shows I was provoked into resurrecting the Schedchk idea and finally it is now ready for a wider audience though there may still be a few rough edges.

I have found several different categories of potential errors in the schedule and these are listed below with examples of how they can occur and action schedchk takes when attempting to fix them.

Other Stuff

Acknowledgements

Date	Version	Author	Description
2020-05-xx	schedchk 0.1,0-0	mymsman	Intial Version All new!	) Acknowledgements Future Enhancements Detect and reschedule recordings active at time of crash Improve Series CRID change detection to reduce false positive's