I don't know why I'm taking the time to write this, because I have already discovered that Sony has no interest in customer concerns. Because of their crass disregard, I have been writing to as many Internet forums, organisations such as Which, the BBC, etc, as I can to alert people. If everybody does the same, Sony will realise that it does not hold a monopoly, but that it operates in a competitive environment, where customer concerns are as important as designing new equipment to generate sales.
I have the same problem, with getting false titles in my list of recorded programmes (only one of my problems). I have a better solution, however.
The Bravia TV uses a microprocessor (a PIC processor, I believe), and as one who has implemented embedded microprocessor solutions, I have aome understanmding of how they work. You can write all sorts of intelligence into a computer program - with the proviso, of course, that intelligence is applied to the writing of the code.
When you select a title for recording (let's say "Football Roundup", that title goes (correctly) into the list of programmes to be recorded. Lets call it List-1. This list also contains the time at which the programme is due to start, and the time duration of the program to be recorded.
When the timer triggers, however, "Homes under the Hammer" is just finishing, and has 10 seconds still to run. In the list of recorded programs (List-2), it lists "Homes under the Hammer". The recording contains 10 seconds of "Homes under the Hammer", followed by "Football Roundup". After the duration of the program, the recording stops.
The problem can be much worse, however. If I want to record "Fantastic Film with a twist at the end", which follows Football Roundup, but the football goes into extended time, so the timer triggers 10 minutes before the end of the football, then my recording starts with 10 minutes of a program football, which is of no interest to me, and 90 minutes later (the duration of the film) it stops. Only, the film was delayed, so 10 minutes gets chopped off the end of it, giving all the pleasure of a book with the last 2 pages torn out.
We know that the original title is available in List-1. We also know that the processor reads the title of the programme that is playing when the recording starts, because that's what it puts into List-2. If the processor program was rewritten so that it waited for the two titles to be the same, then it would not start before the beginning of "Fantastic Film", even though it is delayed. The end of the recording could be done in the same way, so that if you recorded Football Roundup, which is extended, the recording would continue till it finishes.
If there is an overlap between a delayed programme ending and the beginning of a different, non-delayed program to be recorded on another channel, then clearly, a compromise would have to be made - either record the end of one or the beginning of the other, but the user could be given this choice ahead of time by selecting a priority for a program (1 to 9). If one program has a higher priority than another, then its recording would take precedence.
Message was edited by: mijewen
