Systems and methods for automatically scheduling recordings of programming events

摘要

Systems and methods allow for automatic scheduling of audio/video recordings made by in a digital video recorder (DVR) or similar device. The various times during which each of the programming events will be available are determined and maintained in a list. Conflicting periods of time during which multiple programming events are simultaneously received are identified, and a schedule by which each of the programming events is to be recorded is created. Conflicts can be resolved by automatically scheduling the recording of one or more programming events to occur during a re-broadcast of the event at a different time that does not conflict with the other events.

主权项

1. A method executable by a processor to automatically schedule recordings of a plurality of programming events using a plurality of recording resources that are available to the processor, the method comprising:
automatically generating an event list using the processor, wherein the event list comprises, for each of the programming events, at least one of a plurality of time slices representing times during which the programming event is scheduled to occur, wherein multiple broadcasts of the same programming events are represented with different time slices, and wherein each of the plurality of time slices represents a period of time in which at least one of programming events is scheduled to occur and in which the demand for recording resources remains consistent; automatically identifying, with the processor, conflicts occurring during each of the time slices to thereby assign a conflict level to each time slice representing the number of programming events that are available during that time slice; and automatically creating a schedule without user input based upon the time slices using the processor by which each of the programming events is to be recorded, wherein the creating comprises automatically selecting time slices based upon the conflict levels of the time slices, scheduling programming events occurring within the selected time slices for recording using the programming resources during the selected time slices, and updating the event list as time slices are scheduled for recording.