Questions about "Allow partial airings"

General Discussions Plex Features
1

I have 2 questions about this feature:

  1. Can the default setting for this be changed from “true” to “false”?
  2. Do the “Minutes before start” and “Minutes after end” count toward a partial airing? For example, if there are 2 recordings both scheduled with “Allow partial airings” set to false, and 2 minutes before/after, 1 from 8:00 - 8:30 and 1 from 8:30 - 9:00 with both shows be recorded?

Thanks!

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2

Bump. Does anyone know on a more technical level how this feature is actually implemented?

3

Minutes before and after add to the recording time, so you’d be unlikely to get a partial recording from that. If you have two tuners, then there’s no reason both of those shows wouldn’t record.

However, if all your tuners are in use, I’d expect the second airing to conflict, as the two minutes of extra time from the previous recording would mean actual start/end times of 7:58 - 8:32 and 8:28 - 9:02, so you wouldn’t be able to record the second show in its entirety. Does that make sense? :slight_smile:

4

Thanks. That does align with what I’ve been able to test so far. I guess I was hoping that the feature would work more like MCE where padding is done on a “best effort” basis. If you have back to back recordings and there are no free tuners, then the padding will not be used. That is far more useful than the way Plex currently does it.

5

Well, arguably it depends on how often you need padding. I think I’d get more frustrated if every show I watched didn’t have the last five minutes (as the networks where I am routinely run overtime). :man_shrugging: :laughing:

6

Yeah, where I am padding is not needed a whole lot, and when it is it’s only previews or 30 seconds of show or so. However I am a heavy recorder (often running 4 tuners through portions of primetime), so while adding padding is nice, it’s not worth not being able to record a bunch of shows.

Sounds like the ideal situation would be a per-recording option to set the padding as always or best effort! :grin:

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7

This might have already been stated, but when padding a scheduled recording, Plex takes the additional time into account. Therefore, if you have many recordings scheduled back to back and max out the available tuners, it will raise a conflict error when the “last” show is attempting to be scheduled for recording. When that has happened, I would typically go back and change the padding for another show in the time slot ahead of the affected show so I could “squeeze in” the affected show. I agree that Plex should be able to remove padding (perhaps with a warning) to squeeze in a recording so long as it does not conflict with other shows using their native start and end time.

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