[mythtv] Channel Management Ideas and Plans

[John P Poet]

On Sun, Jan 27, 2019 at 2:09 PM David Engel <david at istwok.net> wrote:

> Enhance Channel Visibility with New Values
> ==========================================
>
> Gary Buhrmaster has a nice script for managing the channel.visible
> setting for HDHomeRun Prime users(*)(#).  Unfortunately, the script
> doesn't and can't know things that only the user knows.  Things like
> "even though I can receive the channel, I don't want it visible" or
> "the channel isn't receivable right now but I know it will be when I
> plan to use it".
>
> To solve this problem, I intend to extend the meaning of
> channel.visible from simply no and yes values to also include values
> for "never" and "always".  Gary's script could then be changed to know
> not to override those values.
>
> (*)I can envision other, similar scripts and even functionality built
> into MythTV for periodically scanning and validating channel
> reception.  This change would be useful for them too.
>
> (#)Gary also has other scripts that are very useful for MythTV users.
> In fact, they are part of the inspiration for this series of changes.
>

I am still with Directv (mostly because they cut my bill in half for the
next 12 months when I went to cancel), and they do "free" weekends about
once per quarter, where some subset of their "premium" (e.g. HBO) channels
are free.  I currently have a hacky patch I use to make those channels
visible for a specific date/time range.  Whenever
https://www.freepreview.tv/ indicates that such a weekend is coming up, I
add the dates and times to a configuration file, which is used to override
the visible flag for the specified channels.

The patch is hacky enough that I have never intended to commit it, but if
you are re-working the core of how visibility works, it might be useful to
take this scenario into account.

John
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-dev/attachments/20190127/f61d7dd5/attachment.html>