DVR Scheduling. HOWTO? Record shows with 3 different start times of 'same' show

[rkw15656]

Server Version#: 1.40.3.8555
Tuner Make/Model: HDHomeRun EXTEND

My local TV station has the NEWS on at least10-12 different time slots per day. Unfortunately for me, all these ‘different shows’ have the same name in guide. ie “Action News 4”. I only want three recordings per day (6am, noon, 6pm) NOT 12 recordings.
If i use the Advanced “Limit to air time” to record 6am i get the 6am show, BUT when i try to setup the noon show, Plex won’t let me use Advanced “Limit air time” for noon. The recording setup shows ‘6am’ and won’t let me change it to noon.
Am I missing something or is this a deficiency of Plex DVR. If there was a feature to record by time/channel instead of guide show name, that would fix it.

[pshanew]

@rkw15656

If there was a feature to record by time/channel instead of guide show name, that would fix it.

This feature suggestion covers this scenario; the initial request was to be able to record shows not in the guide, but it gets expanded upon in the comments:

[Feature Request] [DVR] Create recording for program not in EPG

Allow the search to provide a match a user can select for recording regardless of that programs pressence in the EPG. Use case: New series to premier in the fall but it’s still the spring. Since I saw the trailer today I want to create a schedule for when it airs. Then I don’t have to keep tracking the news to find the premier date and create a calendar event to create the schedule. Similar to but without the mysql syntax: https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Custom_Recording

As of right now, you’re going to have problems with these different airings, as you’ve discovered. If each airing truly has the same name, Plex Media Server will just consider these as different airings of the same show. (In my market, the all the networks name their airings differently, including the time. For example, “WYFF News 4 at 5pm” and “WYFF News 4 at 5:30pm” and so on. So they can all be recorded independently.)

If you could find and utilize XMLTV guide data (instead of Plex’s native guide data) you could likely write a script to give each airing a unique name adding, for example, an “at H:MM” to differentiate them. Where you’d obtain that XMLTV guide data I’m not sure. Schedules Direct provides such data, but I don’t think their service terms allow for usage with Plex.

[rkw15656]

thanks much(pshanew) for the suggestion. I have switched to xmltv for the guide. I wrote a python script to append timestamp(5PM) to the title for all tv shows that air more than once in same day with same title and are ‘new’ and do not have ‘episode-num’ info. This seems to catch mostly News tv shows.
A problem i have run into, after switching to xmltv, is that many/most tv shows now are recorded/saved in the Movies folder and not TV Shows folder. And Plex is not giving the option to select TV Show when selecting record. Sorry, separate issue than orig post.