[mythtv] On the FindOne recordings, conflict resolution

Brad Templeton brad+mydev at templetons.com
Thu Jan 20 00:46:40 EST 2005


On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 10:26:28PM -0600, David Engel wrote:
> >     Is this the expected behaviour?
> 
> Yes.  As I noted before, priorities are still used to decide what and
> when to record.  The way I set things up is like this.  I give
> positive priorities to all of the recurring programs that I really
> want to record.  I give negative priorities to all of the recurring,
> "filler" stuff I'd like to record but don't care if it gets missed or
> records later.  Then, all of the "off-the-cuff" single and find
> records I create get the default, zero priority right in the middle
> where I want them.

Hmm.  I would have expressed the ultimate goal of priorities as follows:

    "Try to record as many of the requested shows as you can.  If 2 or
    more must conflict (ie. you can't fix it by moving either one of
    them) then record the show of higher priority."

You are saying, if I read you right, that the higher priority for the
series beats out the lower priority movie, even though the problem
could be solved by recording the series later that night?

Note that doing what I describe above as the right thing is computationally
complex, possibly non-polynomial, but constrainable and usually over a
small set.
> 
> 60 seconds is unusually long.  What hardware are you using?  Perhaps
> there is something wrong with your database.

Athlon-3000, the database seems fine.  My guess is it might be the
use of LIKE %string% 150 times.  I will test that.

> FindOne is primarily intended for movies and specials, IOW not series.
> To find a specific episode of a series, you should use a search
> record.

As noted that is failing CPU-wise.  I just did a test using LIKE %string%
and it took about 25 seconds in my program, so that's probably the culprit.


> See above.  FWIW, SingleRecord doesn't really do what you are asking
> for either.  All it really does is record that title at that time.
> The network could change the episode and Myth would still record it.

Right, so I would need to code (once I can get mythtv to link, sigh)
a new kind of query that is a mix between the FindOne and the SingleRecord.

Or presumably something that is identical to FindOne but keys off the
ProgramID or Title/Subtitle rather than just the Title would do just
the job I am looking for.

Might also propose a change of the vocabulary to make things clearer,
since you come to a recording by picking an episode rather than a series
in the UI, the phrase "One showing of this program" is ambiguous and
might be clearer as "One showing of this Title" or "Of this series" if
there is a SeriesID, and "Of this program" if there is not.

I presume FindOne was intended to allow you to say "Hmm, there's a new
series, grab an episode of it, any episode!"   I must say I was confused
by it, in that if you pick a specific episode off the menu and ask
to record it, it is surprising to see it record a different one and
not the one you clicked on.

Thanks for all the help.  I hope you will like what the new program does.
I will write another mail describing the new release of it.



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