Sunday 12 August 2012

Day 19 - Time to bid London 2012 farewell

It's been a long slog, but we're approaching the finishing line today with effectively a half-day of sports to end my marathon recording sessions. The last daily recording figures are 10 channels, 11 sports and 18 slots totalling 53 hours and 25 minutes recording time, which means we say goodbye to channels 11 and 12 today. Despite the lightest day since we went to full days on 28th July, today's modern pentathlon still managed to break the earliest start time record held by hockey (08:20) by a full 30 minutes today with a painfully early 07:50 start time.

pc1 tuner 3 is managing to report "no signal" this morning for the first time, so I'm on 6 tuners for the final day. The last sports to start today are handball and basketball (both 14:50), but it's actually modern pentathlon that takes the honour of being the last sport to finish these Olympics (18:50). The closing ceremony runs from 20:50 to 00:25, though as I said yesterday, it bizarrely only runs on 1 of the 24 channels and without any commentary on that channel!

Anthony Joshua's boxing gold was a close fought effort that brought us a 29th gold and 64th medal in all. It also gives us a 5 gold lead to the Russian Federation with only a few golds left to be awarded, so confirms that GB will finish 3rd place in the medal table.

We've now discovered what they're showing on the unused channels through to tomorrow - a "Thank you for watching" caption at the top, a sunset picture in the middle and a "Relive the Olympics at bbc.co.uk/sport" caption at the bottom. How long you'll be allowed to relive the Olympics due to rights issues is up to debate though :-)

One minor snafu with the "Thank you for watching" caption is that once the basketball final slot finished at 17:50 on BBC Olympics 1 HD, they put that caption on for the next 3 hours on that channel. Bzzt! The Now/Next info indicated the "London 2012 Closing Ceremony" was to air at 20:50 on that channel, so we have more watching to do and don't need thanking on that channel quite yet :-)

I also spotted several closing credits airing today as each sat channel finished its broadcasting for the Games. It was accompanied by an Irish-sounding folky number that almost sounded like it was saying "that Ireland is my home", whereas I think it was supposed to say "that island is my home". Very confusing!

Samantha Murray's silver in the women's modern pentathlon - pipping Australia's 16 silvers at the last gasp - completed our medal haul in London 2012. It's a shame that terrestrial BBC missed Murray's medal ceremony live, instead having a recorded piece about the closing ceremony. When they did show it on BBC One HD, they never admitted it wasn't live either, which was a little naughty and sad to see as the last sport-related live Olympics terrestrial footage was tinged with a bit of sneaky recording.

We finished with 29 golds (3rd), 17 silvers (5th) and 19 bronzes (4th) for a total of 65 medals (4th). One minor trivia point: the country with the most bronzes (the Russian Federation with 33) wasn't in the top three of the medal table, which can't have happened very often in past Olympics.

I've been busy tonight reconfiguring pc2 back to how it was pre-Olympics and here's the differences:
  • Once the closing ceremony has finished and transmedia has moved it to HDD, then transmedia will be disabled permanently. Recordings will be directly to SSD and watched/deleted before the 200GB buffer fills - anything to be kept will be manually copied off SSD to HDD and then deleted from SSD.
  • Recording config will be changed to 2 mins pre-padding, 5 mins post-padding and recording programmes in a flat dir, rather than sub-dirs for the date and channel.
  • All 24 BBC Olympics HD channels will removed and all Astra transponders added (I'd limited them to the 6 Olympics transponders and the pre-Olympics BBC HD transponder).
  • My favourite HD channels will be added to the sat config and similarly SD channels will be added to the terrestrial config.
  • Olympics automatic recording strings will be removed and my normal favourite programme titles will be added instead.
  • Suspend-if-idle cron job will be re-enabled so that pc2 will wake either 15 mins before a recording is due to start or if it receives a Wake On LAN, whichever comes first. It will suspend 15 mins after a recording ends, providing no-one is interactively logged in, neither Revo is on the network and there isn't another recording starting in the next 15 mins.
pc1 will return to being a "serious" CentOS 6.3 desktop, with revo1 still initially being used, albeit to view pc2's recordings instead of pc1's (which will no longer record anything). I may eliminate revo1 and revo2 by using VMs with Ubuntu+XBMC on pc1 and pc2 in the future, though this may mean firing up the Ubuntu desktop on pc2 (which currently is in text console mode).

Predictably, the closing ceremony programme on BBC One HD overran by 45 minutes (more than twice as long an overrun as the opening ceremony!) - why can't they time these things a bit better? As I said though, BBC Olympics 1 HD had it right - its slot ended at 00:25 i.e. with 10 minutes to spare. That's the end of my Olympics recording then and I managed just under 15TB of recording during the 19 days - enough to fill roughly 5 of the 3TB drives I have.

 Day 19 recording size: 429GB - grand total: 14940GB (14.6TB)

1 comment:

  1. It was really quite sad to say goodbye to the Olympics as it domintated my life for over two weeks. I feel a bit lost without it now and being back at work on Monday was a bit of a come down after the enjoyment of all that sport. I hope you keep posting on here until you finish going through all your video.

    If you are still willing to help me out on all my missed recordings I have set up a gmail account that I can post publicly here so you could contact me. I know it is a lot to ask but would appreciate any assistance you could give me.

    Thanks
    olympicsfan1896@gmail.com

    ReplyDelete