While experimenting with how the Plex scheduler would handle a small overlap between shows on different channels, I found that it completely failed to do the rational thing and dropped a show that should only have lost 1min of show time at the very end.
As discussed in the following thread asking about plans for a multirec feature to handle multiplexed content on the same channel frequency:
there are reasons that record schedule times need to overlap a little. The most common reason is sub-channels that handle rebroadcasting older shows/episodes. Many of them tend to not have any commercial buffer between the end of one show and the start of another. Quite often, the previous show is wrapping up at the official start time of the next show, and the beginning of the following show starts up after the credits and up to a minute after it was officially supposed to start (repeats of Modern Marvels on Quest and Blue Bloods on Ion are current examples of this shifted, no-buffer behavior).
The following is a recent scheduling conflict that I let play out to see how the Plex scheduler would handle the overlap when it happened on different channels:
11:00AM-12:01PM: BB S07E07
12:00PM-01:01PM: BB S07E08 (conflict on the extra minute only)
01:00PM-02:00PM: DOOL
01:00PM-02:01PM: MM S13E15
01:00PM-02:01PM: BB S07E09 (full hour conflict with higher priority shows)
02:00PM-03:01PM: MM S19E08
02:00PM-03:01PM: BB S07E10
The priority order of the above is: DOOL, MM, BB
From the above schedule, I was fully expecting that the Blue Bloods S07E09 program would not record as there was a hard conflict for the 01:00PM-2:00PM time slot (I have a 2 tuner HDHomeRun). I was hoping that Plex would do the right thing and stop recording the 12:00PM showing of Blue Bloods S07E08 when it needed to switch over to start recording the 01:00PM showings of Days of Our Lives and Modern Marvels.
What it ended up doing was completely missing the 12:00PM-01:00PM showing of Blue Bloods when the only conflict was during the normally requested 1 minute extension. The really odd part was that it actually recorded 1 minute of the BB S07E09 episode when the DOOL recording ended at 2:00PM.
This is just wrong. If the scheduler is smart enough to know that it can capture the last minute of the second conflict, it should definitely favor keeping the full 1hour segment of the previous show and simply lose the last minute.
On the plus side, this little experiment showed that the software appears to be able to handle multiple output files from the same sub-channel, and I was seeing overlapped file recordings for Blue Bloods and Modern Marvels. But, this small win does not excuse the complete loss of the 12:00PM showing of Blue Bloods. That logic flaw needs to be fixed ASAP.
