Soft Padding Fix

[benneh]

Hi All,

WAF has declined of late after missing the end of a few very important shows, so I decided its about time I did something about fixing the ridiculous 4 minute maximum for pre and post recording soft padding. Now we all know changing the related registry values works very temporarily but MCE always overwrites the values periodically (each time it starts?) back down to 4 minutes.

So with a little time on my hands today, I am now 90% through writing a c# based windows service which sets a watch on the registry keys and overwrites them immediately, its done including installer, the only thing holding me back is figuring out how to do the watch on the registry key, as the api does not support proper watches. I could work around it by just doing periodic checks but i dont think it is as clean, so i will try get my head around doing it with advapi32.dll

More on this hopefully soon...

[GlenR]

Excellent! A fix for the 4 minute maximum would be great.

Good show, Benneh.

Of course, the real fix would be if the TV stations actually worked to their advertised programming.

[Sambooka]

Good stuff benneh I hope it works out.

I'll use it for sure.

Cheers

Sambooka

[simbot82]

this would be great benneh wrap your head around it

[aswigon]

Top work. Can't wait to give it a go!

[Matt]

Good stuff! I'm keen to get my grubby mits on this one

[arkay]

Wouldn't changing the key then write protecting it do the same job?

At any rate. Nice idea. You can probably expand it to do a million things that constantly need watching and fixing in MCE

Cheers,
Arkay.

[benneh]

Originally Posted by arkay

Wouldn't changing the key then write protecting it do the same job?

At any rate. Nice idea. You can probably expand it to do a million things that constantly need watching and fixing in MCE

Cheers,
Arkay.

Not sure, that might work too, not sure under which credentials MCE is switching it back, and MCE might have a hernia if it tries to write and is denied?

It certainly could be expanded to do lots of other stuff, like a system maintainance that is smart enough to not restart your services if there is something currently recording, that'd be a one up on MS implementation too

Anyhow, almost finished now, decided to give up on the registry watch code as it strangely sending CPU usage through the roof like some kinda infinite loop, so I am just polling the value every 30 secs now, and changing it if its not what you set it to be...

[Circuit]

I tried setting up a script to write the reg setting each time my system comes out of standby.

Didn't seem to work, the reg settings were still as I set them but soft padding was not working.

I was altering the setting softpostpadding which MCE Customizer alters.
Could never get it to work more than a couple of times.

I couldn't find any other reg setting that looked likely.

[SupaStar]

Probably my biggest gripe with MCE is the inabilty to increase the soft padding beyond 4 minutes. There is nothing worse than missing the end of a TV show!!

Good luck benneh!

[benneh]

ok, been slugging away at it, but having problems getting the timer event to fire, which after a bit of reading i found often happens in windows services unless you use a threaded timer... i really hope this works after all this effort!

[jwort]

Not sure whether this is relevant or not, but the softpadding can be changed to maximum 30 minutes if you go into the scheduled recording from the guide?

If the show is a series scheduled event, go into the details of the series and change it to 30 minutes.

Case solved and your WAF will no longer WAF

jwort

[Sambooka]

Hi jwort,

Good thinking but that is a Hard Padding setting not Soft Padding.

Cheers

Sambooka