Saturday 4 August 2012

Day 11 - Jessica's second day

21 channels, 23 sports and 55 slots totalling 188 hours and 5 minutes of recording mark the start of the second weekend of Olympics recording, though digiguide.tv's claim that channels 22-24 aren't used sounds a bit fishy to me. There's a few "new" sports like triathlon and trampolining today, plus maybe the first time we've seen 6 slots for a sport (table tennis) in one day.

I was slightly disappointed with Jessica Ennis's high jump (9cm short of her PB set 5 years ago) and shot put (39cm behind last year's PB) yesterday, which does highlight that she can be inconsistent in her events. It is a little strange that she can set two excellent PB's (110m hurdles and 200m) and yet be so far off her PB's in the other two. The hurdles run was particularly impressive though, setting a time of 12.54s that equalled the Olympic gold medal run in the 110m hurdles final four years ago!

I guess we can't complain too much because even with the uneven performance, this was actually a PB for her first day total, making her on target to beat her GB record of 6,906 points that was set only a few months ago. She'll need a 6.40-6.50m long jump, a 47m javelin (probably needs a PB in this because it's her weakest event) and a 2:07 or 2:08 800m today to win gold and break the British record.

Whether it's a known issue with the quad sat tuner card I have, but pc2's tuner 4 is now showing the same "constant FEC" or "bursting FEC" status in tvheadend that pc1's tuner 4 has had since the Olympics started. As a precaution, I've removed the transponder info from pc2 tuner 4, but this means I can't double up anything any more of course because I'm down to 6 tuners now. Luckily, I was actually doubling up the only channel on that tuner (11 - showing water polo this morning) when the error occurred, so I just stopped the pc2 recording and let's hope I get no more faults, because I will then start losing video big time. Sadly, pc1 tuner 4 is still non-functioning (just checked it now) and I don't have much hope that it will come back before the end of the Olympics.

Stunningly, our 9th gold medal (in the rowing men's four) has put us third in the medal table, which is the highest position we could ever achieve! And we're onto the 10th gold now with the women's lightweight double sculls pulling off an impressive win (though the BBC News home page claimed we have 9 golds for a good 15-20 mins after the 10th was won!). The big question now is: can we keep third place in the medal table to the end of the Olympics? I suspect it could be tough unless we get some surprise golds from somewhere.

Jessica jumped 6.48m in the long jump this morning, which is only 3cm short of her PB and near the top of end of my predicted 6.40-6.50m jump range I said she needed for gold. It's now looking very good for gold for Jessica tonight, provided she can get close to or exceed 47m in the javelin. One minor trivia point about Austra Skujte whom Jessica is leading by 258 points - Austra is actually the decathlon world record holder. She's managed to hold onto that world record for 7 years because I bet that very few women's decathlons actually take place.

Not clever to interview people at the rowing regatta right by the PA speaker - that's happened at least twice this morning and you'd think they'd have learned not to try to out-shout David Bowie's "Heroes" by now :-)

An excellent new PB of 47.49m in the javelin for Jessica has sealed both Olympic gold and the British record (which she holds already anyway). There's now some silly talk on the BBC of exceeding 7,000 points, but Jessica would have to beat her 800m PB by a full 2 seconds, which isn't going to happen. Showing how weak Jessica's javelin is, she only threw the 10th longest distance and her lead to Skujte has actually been cut to 188 points.

Well done to the women's cycling team pursuit who picked up our 11th gold of the games, now meaning that we have a 2 gold lead over South Korea and remain in 3rd place in the medal table. The cycling, like 4 years ago, has been very impressive, with a load of world records and some dominant performances.

3 gold medals for Team GB in one night in the athletics stadium is nothing short of astonishing - I wasn't sure we'd get more than a couple of athletics golds in the entire Olympics. Jessica's run in the 800m was almost as good as her 110m hurdles yesterday. She won her heat, but surprisingly didn't set an 800m PB on her way to a new British and Commonwealth record total of 6,955 points and the gold medal of course.

I did pity Greg Rutherford in the long jump though - his was the big surprise gold of the night, but everyone was cheering Mo Farah to his historic 10,000m gold at the time so it got a little lost in the Mo-fever in the stadium. It was the first time  GB had won three Olympic golds in a single athletics session, but seeing GB - predictably! - lose on football penalties against our medal table rivals South Korea left a little bit of a sour taste to the evening's end. Still, GB's 14th gold has stretched our lead to 5 ahead of South Korea, which should keep third place safe for at least a few days.

A lot of late-night terrestrial overruns by some 25 minutes because of the athletics (yes, including the lottery show), but I see the BBC threw in a 2 hours 59 mins Now/Next slot on BBC One HD at 22:25 to cover all their Olympic overruns in one giant block, so I'll leave that running until Olympic Sportsday ends.

 Day 11 recording size: 1011GB - grand total so far: 9461GB (9.2TB)

5 comments:

  1. I am very dissappointed again with the BBC today. I set up to record the rowing which was supposed to be on Stream 2 today from 9.25am only to discover at 1pm that I had missed it all because they moved it and put the tennis on instead. At 9.20am it was still advertised on their repetative timetable as being on Stream 2. Infact I had to check on Freesat's online timetable which had it still listed on Stream 2 to notice they had put in another Stream for rowing on Stream 18. So after quickly stopping the recording of stream 2 and starting stream 18 I got the end of the final victory ceremony. I really am so angry, not just at the BBC but at myself for not checking it at the start. The problem was that so far the advertised streams have all stayed the same and this is the first time it has changed. I was watching the Athletics, Cycling and Rowing on BBC One HD so I just didn't get a chance to check it was recording OK. I am going to have to make sure next time that nothing has been moved.

    Did your recording of the rowing stream go OK. I know your system is much more advanced and you don't manually program recordings, but did this change of channel affect you?

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  2. It looks like the EIT info picked up the channel 18 change and started a rowing recording on that channel. Both channels 2 and 18 are labelled Rowing as far as filenames were confirmed and nearly the same size (22GB vs. 23GB), finishing at 13:25 (that includes 5 mins of post-padding).

    So, for once, they did actually adjust the Now/Next info to allow for a change in schedule - I'm sure they haven't always done that for overruns in the past for example (if I'm lucky to be watching the appropriate channel, I can add the next slot to be recorded, but I'm rarely that lucky!).

    When it's set properly by the broadcaster, Now/Next info is actually the best way to track schedule changes and, as I've said before, you also need a "string matching" recording interface because you may get channel changes and not just slot changes on the same channel. I did actually some sports strings to my Automatic Recording config on both PCs today - if I hadn't have done that, I would have missed out on "new" stuff like the triathlon today.

    I wish tvheadend's Automatic Recording also had some sort of way to apply grep-style strings to the channel name as well (e.g. "BBC Olympics .* HD") and perhaps allow boolean logic in an easy syntax e.g. channel="BBC Olympics .* HD" AND NOT title="This Is BBC Olympics .*", which would be an ace one-liner to cover all 24 channels without having to have 36-odd sports strings defined.

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  3. I have another complaint about the BBC. Currently watching what was supposed to be an uninterrupted stream of the last Swimming session only to discover I get the pleasure of Claire and Mark waffling in between races. I wouldn't mind so much if I only had to hear them but why do I need to see them instead of what's happening behind them in the venue.

    I am glad you managed to record that rowing session despite the change as it was a great morning for GB.

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    1. Just to add I am missing Adrian an Andy's chats between events as Claire and Mark can not compare.

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  4. I've always been a big fan of Adrian and Andy's commentaries because they're not only very knowledgeable about swimming, but the banter between the two of them is just great. Clare Balding is a horsey person who doesn't really belong on the swimming pundit team at all and whilst Mark is OK, he's not in A&A's league really. Mind you, the worst mis-match has to be football/ex-F1 commentator Jonathan Legard on the volleyball!

    The cycling coverage on terrestrial had a similar issue - Jake waffling with Mark Cavendish (who, whilst a great sprinter, is not a great pundit at all) whilst there's events going behind them!

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