[mythtv] Brainstorming a new idea for the program guide

[Rob Smith]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 2:59 PM, Robert Johnston <anaerin at gmail.com> wrote:
> It could also be possible, if TVDB are willing...

So, as you just said here, TVDB is not Myth, nor are we a part of
TVDB. We have no control over their code, have no idea if their
servers could handle it or not (and I'd venture to guess (yes guess)
that they couldn't).

All this is entirely meaningless on here until someone contacts TVDB
and asks them permission to increase their (already overloaded)
servers by a few thousand-fold.

It's not even that your "Cache preload burst" would save that much
over just a pipe-lined datadump, as the zipping wouldn't actually
compress that well (these images are already compressed), so you're
eating up a lot of cpu time, and then you can't really cache the
results, as everyone's lineups are different. For example, I have
FIOS, but I have all my sports and shopping channels out of my
line-up, along with a majority of news channels. But not all of them.
That's a (semi)unique setup for me, with a (semi)unique pile of
images. It's a lot of work for very little gain.

Also keep in mind how many users, let's do some math

In the past month (Aug 21 to Sept 20th), we had 13,000 downloads of
0.21 from mythtv.org. Let's assume that 10,000 of them actually used
the software and they have 5,000 shows in their guide data, at 5kb per
show. (My guide listing has 5954 shows fyi, SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT
TITLE) FROM program ).
	
10000 * 5000 * (5 kilobytes) = 238.418579 gigabytes

and for the current 500kb art downloads
10000 * 5000 * (500 kilobytes) = 23.2830644 terabytes

Just for the last month of downloads, from mythtv.org. Not counting
the ones via package managers, shipped with the os, etc.

That's a lot of data, and the potential is much much more. Sure,
there's plenty of ways they might be able to change to make it work,
but you'll need to talk with *them* to see if it could work and not
argue with us about how trivial it is/could be/if they're even willing
to allow us to do this.