"Recording will expire at 1:07 AM"

[Joram]

Last night I recorded Game 3 of the World Series on the Fox broadcast network. I knew beforehand that I wouldn't be able to watch the game live uninterrupted, so the previous night I'd set it to record, with an extra 1-hour recording period at the end to cover the possibility of extra innings. (Got caught out on that one in Game 1, when I set it for "only" 30 extra minutes, a total of 3:30.)

Imagine my surprise when, later in the evening, I sat down to watch the rest of the game and, when I clicked on it in Recordings, the screen showed a yellow triangle in the bottom left corner followed by the notice that the "Recording will expire at 1:07 AM." Moreover, WMC added only 40 minutes at the end, rather than the 60 minutes I had set. (There were no concurrent recordings, so tuner availability was not an issue.)

Has anybody seen this triangle and notice before? I've never heard of a recording "expiring" at some specific time. Any ideas what was going on there? I knew that FS1 was obnoxious about copy-protecting MLB playoff games, but this is the World Series on broadcast TV.

Glitch? Deliberate?

[Space]

There is a setting for each recording (and each Series) called "Keep Until" that indicates how long you want to retain it. Some options are "Keep until I watch", "Keep until Space Needed", and "Keep until I Delete". You can also specify the number of episodes you want a Series to retain, and how episodes are automatically deleted when you exceed that value (either delete the oldest one and record the new one, or just don't record the new one).

Whenever you create a new Series, or schedule a one-off recording, it sets this value to whatever you have configured as the default (Settings->TV->Recorder->Recording Defaults). Unless you have it set to "Until I delete" (or "Until I Watch"), WMC will eventually schedule recorded shows to be deleted automatically, even if you haven't watched them (except if set to "Until I Watch").

Now, I have NEVER used anything but "Until I Delete" so my knowledge of the other settings are not very good. Also, I'm not sure if that "expire" message is due to the things discussed above. I do think there are DRM setting that the network can set that would only allow you to retain a recording of a show for a certain period of time, but I have never seen this on WMC, nor heard of anyone who had experienced it.

As for your padding of 60 minutes only being 40 minutes, that I am not sure of if you had no other conflicting recordings, although if you used one of the "when possible" options, it may not add the full padding if it needs the tuner for another recording at that time.

[Joram]

Yeah, like you we only ever use the "Keep until I delete" setting, which I've set as the default.

It's all very strange. This morning, out of curiosity I went to play the recording that was said to expire overnight, and it played just fine. I even put it on a flash drive and took it to a different 7MC machine, and it played just fine even though it's still displaying the expiration notice. Go figure.

[Space]

Might just be some DB or metadata corruption. I've had rare instances of this occurring, probably due to some rarely occurring WMC bugs.

I believe the "expire" message just means that it is tagged as deleteable after that date, not that it will be deleted on that date. I think it only deletes recordings when it needs to make room for a new recording. You may be able to prevent this recording from being deleted by changing the "Keep Until" setting of the recording to "Until I delete", if it is not set to that already. However if you have plenty of free space allocated to WMC, then it may never actually have to delete it even if you don't change that setting.

[Joram]

Thanks, that makes sense. Maybe "expires" doesn't really mean "expires" in the way that we would normally think of it.

BTW, tonight's World Series recording didn't show up with that triangle.