[mythtv] Recording Group [was: mythtv commits]

Bruce Markey bjm at lvcm.com
Sun Dec 7 21:35:08 EST 2003


> Ahhh, so people are waiting on ME to do it... :)  I'll get to it.  I just
> made a note in my TODO list about checking this screen as well when I get
> around to changing the other stuff.

I also thought that the last thread ended with you signing
up to take this on. The only change needed for this button
would be subtitle or description rather than subtitle and
description.

> <offtopic>
> I might get sidetracked before then though for a little while.  Yesterday
> I thought up the idea of having an attribute/column called something like
> "Recording Group".  There would be a Default group and maybe an Auto-Expire
> group eventually, but the user could create their own groups as well and
> even password protect a group.  When you setup a scheduled recording, you
> could specify a Recording Group on the Advanced Recording Options screen.
> So I could throw all my home improvement type shows into a "Home Improvement"
> group, movies into "Movies", my wife's TLC shows into Auto-Expire, etc..

Your wife must really like Junkyard Wars or do they have other
shows? I wouldn't know, I don't even know the channel number ;-).

> On the playbackbox screen, you would be able to toggle which group was
> currently being viewed or you could view ALL (provided no groups had
> passwords).  Maybe even allow locking a frontend into only viewing a
> particular group so someone could have a frontend that could only view
> the kids programs, etc..

What I'd envision would be group names in the left hand column
of the playbackbox screen similar to "All Programs". List all
the groups before the alpha list of titles.

> Basically talking about adding a "recordinggroups" table with a groupname
> and groupid.  Then add a groupid to record and recorded.  Then a way to
> toggle what group was being viewed on the playbackbox screen and a way to
> move a recording to another group from playbackbox as well.

I like it. On a project I was involved with before finding
myth, we were thinking about "folders". The same kinds of
subset groupings and also different sort orders. You could
have a folder "Auto-Expire" sorted with the next to expire at
the top. "Keep" for things not set for auto-expire (presumably
the same as archive) sorted my title. "Favorites" sorted by
ranking... opps, priority. "Size" for the delete page to show
the biggest files at the top. And so on. Of course, password
protected items would need to be excluded before any of the
grouping or sorting.

> </offtopic>

My most recent brainstorm from about a week ago is "What's New".
MythTV doesn't have a way to highlight specials or series
premieres. However, I came up with a simple (although not very
selective) approach. I created an 'oldtitle' table with title
and airdate fields (the airdate is just there to aid with cleanup
down the line). When mythfilldatabase runs and before it cleans
up old program entries, it groups all the titles with a starttime
before the current time and adds any of these titles that were
not already in oldtitle. After a week, all the daily and weekly
show are included.

Once the table is populated, this query will return any upcoming
titles in the current listings that are not in the oldtitle table
and sort them by date.

select program.title,program.starttime from program LEFT JOIN oldtitle ON program.title=oldtitle.title WHERE oldtitle.title IS NULL AND program.starttime  > NOW() group by title order by starttime;
+---------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| title                                       | starttime           |
+---------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Cinderella II: Dreams Come True             | 2003-12-07 18:00:00 |
| Las Vegas Town Hall                         | 2003-12-07 18:00:00 |
| Columbo: Agenda for Murder                  | 2003-12-07 18:00:00 |
| Alicia Keys: Video Diary                    | 2003-12-07 18:00:00 |
| Travel Tech                                 | 2003-12-07 18:00:00 |
| Misery                                      | 2003-12-07 18:30:00 |
| Saturday Night Live Christmas 2002          | 2003-12-07 19:00:00 |
| Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery | 2003-12-07 19:00:00 |
| A Fistful of Dollars                        | 2003-12-07 19:00:00 |
| MC Battle II: The Takeover in Times Square  | 2003-12-07 19:00:00 |

This would include a few series premieres, more specials than
I'd expected and lots of movies. I would expect the number
of movies to go down after a few months but it would probably
always be mostly movies. The first time I ran this, I discovered
that SpikeTV will be showing the second season of "Oblivious"
(later tonight BTW. Add this as a channel record to check it out
sometime this week. You can always delete it if it isn't appealing).

I'm thinking about reusing the proglist page. By passing an arg
or calling another method, it could use this query to populate a
proglist page which would then have all the same look, feel and
features (pressing "R" or "I" to set up recordings).

Then I thought that it may not be a good thing to clutter the
Schedule Recordings menu with a "What's New" item 'cuase we
still need a Search page. That lead to thinking that this could
be a button on a "Search" page. Search could also do the same
thing of passing an arg or calling a method to populate a
proglist page with the results of a keyword search query.

--  bjm



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