[mythtv-users] Broadening Record Duplicates?

Bruce Markey bjm at lvcm.com
Wed Nov 12 22:44:52 EST 2003


1,$s/Episode/subtitle/g

Calling subtitle "Episode" isn't enough to convince me that
these are unique identifiers ;-).

Ben Curtis wrote:
>>From what I can tell, "don't record duplicates" works by comparing title,
> episode, and description.  If the recording has all of these, it's added
> to the oldrecordings table, and matched against later.  If either of these
> fields is blank, it is not added and recorded, even if it may be a
> duplicate.  Right?

Close but not exactly. Everything that is recorded is added
to the oldrecorded table. A future episode only matches if the
title, subtitle and description match.

> So, many shows get left out because they leave the description field 
> blank.  You can't compare without description because many other shows set 
> the Episode name to the same value for every episode, so you would miss 
> shows.
> 
> That being said, couldn't mythtv validate against the current program 
> guide to see if its a duplicate?  Example:
> 
> - Show comes on Thursday, at 1:30AM.
>     Title: Blue Gender
>     Episode: Oasis
>     Description: None. (null)
>   This is added to the oldrecorded table reguardless of missing 
> description
> 
> - Show comes on again at 4:30AM
>     Title: Blue Gender
>     Episode: Oasis
>     Description: None. (null)
>   Now, this episode matches the one in the oldrecorded table, BUT it has a 
> null in one of the three fields, so lets compare it to the programs in the 
> guide for the past/present/future (I.E. everything in the programs table 
> and/or oldrecorded table).

You can look at any one situation but you need to consider all
the possibilities. Here is a common situations where subtitle
only matches will not do the right thing:

 - Show comes on Tuesday at 7:30PM
    Title: MLB Baseball
    Subtitle: Chicago Cubs vs Boston Red Sox
    Description: None. (null)

 - Show comes on Wednesday at 7:30PM
    Title: MLB Baseball
    Subtitle: Chicago Cubs vs Boston Red Sox
    Description: None. (null)

 - Show comes on Thursday at 12:00AM
    Title: MLB Baseball
    Subtitle: Chicago Cubs vs Boston Red Sox
    Description: "(Taped)"

 - Show comes on Thursday at 1:00PM
    Title: MLB Baseball
    Subtitle: Chicago Cubs vs Boston Red Sox
    Description: None. (null)

I threw in a reboradcast just for yucks ;-). There is no one
size fits all solution for partial listing info. This is why
The default is conservative and only matches on all three. This
is correct >99% but even last Sunday there was one hour of "PGA
Golf" and ESPN followed by four hours of "PGA Golf" coverage
on ABC with the same subtitle and description.

Some shows even appear as if matching just the description
with no subtitle will work but these are in the minority. Most
of the time a description with no subtitle is a 'generic' episode.
For example, "Seinfeld" may say "Jerry and his friends face life
in New York." This doesn't say if it is "The Contest" or "The
Soup Nazi". With description match only, it would only record
one generic episode once and skip all others. "Reno 911" may
usually work for description only but most other shows would fail.

The real problem here is that the xmltv output does not include
episode numbers, air dates or database unique identifiers for
each unique episode, generic episodes, or unique features (movies,
specials, live events, etc.). The listings for commercial DVRs
do have access to this info in their listings services. Without
this, there is no way MythTV can be truly accurate in marking
duplicates.

However, this week David Engel added a feature for "overrides"
which allows you to specify any single showing as "do record"
or "don't record". This allows you to fix any potential problems
as you see fit. In your example, you could go to the conflicts
page, highlight the showing of "Oasis" that you decide you don't
need, press enter and choose "Don't record it". The conflicts
page also does a better job of displaying all upcoming showings
and which ones will actually be recorded when the time comes.
This will be in 0.13 and is in current CVS.

--  bjm




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