[mythtv] Schema question---are programid's globally unique?

Daniel Kristjansson danielk at cuymedia.net
Sat Jan 12 22:23:58 UTC 2008


On Sat, 2008-01-12 at 16:12 -0500, f-myth-users at media.mit.edu wrote:
> Are programid's guaranteed unique all by themselves (e.g,. the same
> programid will never refer to two different "shows", be they single
> movies or episodes of a series, etc) or are they only supposedly
> unique when paired with a seriesid (if present)?
> 
> [Yes, I know that occasionally the same episode of something will
> spuriously claim different programid's in different showings; I'm
> staring at an example right now.  But that seems to be carelessness
> in TMS's handling of particular types of series, e.g., "How It's Made."
> I'm asking about the other direction of the bijection.]
> 
> Either way, is this documented anywhere?  I recall that DataDirect
> documented their schema (did anyone save snapshots of that site?),
> but I also seem to recall talk that SchedulesDirect/TMS claimed that
> the -new- schema was proprietary, which I find rather obnoxious, if
> it's true...

The schema PDF documentation was proprietary too; TMS just had you
click-through an NDA on the Labs website. The Schedules Direct board
didn't want people to have to agree to an NDA to use the service, nor
did it want to be in the position of having to enforce the NDA in
court on TMS's behalf. There is no new documentation from TMS, they
just sent a note about the programid field expanding which was posted
in the Schedules Direct Developer's forum.

Anyway, programid's are not guaranteed to be unique. Look at the
MythTV scheduler for which ones are unique and and which are not.
Plus you can search the mailing list for Bruce's very detailed
explanation of the different types, he described things much much
better than the terse two sentence description in the Labs docs.

-- Daniel



More information about the mythtv-dev mailing list