[mythtv] Regular expressions for program matching

[Geoffrey Hausheer]

The discussions on conflict resolution got me thinkning about a feature
that I'd find very useful.

Specifically, I'd like to be able to record a program based on regexp
matching of title, subtitle, and description.

I've run into 2 situations that make me want this:  (a) The entwork runs
a special or changes the title of the program.  For instance I had a rule
for 'Junkyard Wars', but the network started running 'Junkyard Mega-Wars'
which I missed.  Of course, this is a horrible example, as it is
unlinkely I would have built a rule that would catch both, but something
like 'Junkyard' in the title on TLC would have done it.  (b) I want to
record a specific episode of a show, but it isn't in the program-listing,
so I could search for Title = 'Foo', Episode = '13', and I don't need to
keep checking to see if the program is coming up.

Implementation in mythbackend is pretty easy.  It requires adding a few
fields to the record table, and changing the program seacrh code (which
is pretty messy).  It'll be limited to MYSQL's matching capabilities.  I
could probably implement the backend changes in a couple hours.

The frontend is more tricky.  It would basically require keyboard input
(yuck), and would require a new screen where you could type the relevant
info.  It would also solve the problem of trying to record a program
which isn't playing imminently...say you really want to record 'Power
Rangers: The Movie', but have no idea when some network will show it
again.

With something like this, it would probably be useful to have a way to
veiw the record table to manage entries which have no match in the
current program listing.

As I said, the hard part here is coming up with a user interface.  I
don't think it is worth doing if it can't be controlled by a remote, but
the only two ways i can think of to do that would be to have a keyboard
printed at the bottom of the screen with keys that could be selected via
remote, or something like how arcade games work, scrolling trhough the
letters to find the ne you want.  Both of those options seem pretty
crappy to me.  And proabbly prettyhard to support with
internationalization.

So if anyone has any ideas on how to make the user-interface, I'll get to
work coding, but there is no point to doing so otherwise.

.Geoff