[mythtv-users] Success story and my own Tivo comparison (long and windy)

[James L. Paul]

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Joseph A. Caputo wrote:
| Comments inline.
|
| On Thursday 09 October 2003 10:24 am, James L. Paul wrote:
|
|>That about sums up my MythTV background. Now here's some thoughts:
|
|
| [snip]
|
|
|>Does everybody really prefer navigating a hierarchical menu system
|>instead of single buttons on a remote? Most remotes have plenty of
|>buttons, I'd rather just press one for a 'TV Guide' grid or whatnot,
|>rather than navigate out of wherever I am and then dig through more
|>menus arrowing around to get to the appropriate gui page. I intend to
|>poke through the code to see if I can easily add some unused keys to
|>jump me to commonly used features that I can map to my IR remote. Is
|>there already a way to do what I want that I missed seeing?
|
|
| This would be really nice; it's been discussed, and it's generally
agreed that
| it would be a nice thing to have.  However, the question of how to
implement
| it *well* looms large.  It really doesn't fit in with the current
| hierarchical GUI architecture.  Personally, I think that to do it
right the
| entire Myth UI would have to be overhauled, if not completely scrapped
and
| re-done from scratch.  I don't know about you, but I don't have the
time for
| that large a task.

Perhaps I can work around it with some multi-key macros for my top
choices if it's that hard to implement. I'm not using native lirc, so
perhaps I'll gain some flexibility there. I doubt I have the time to do
more, we're in the same boat there. :)

|
|>Being a Tivo user, I'm addicted to the simplicity. For example, if I'm
|>browsing the "Watch Recordings" and want to delete a show instead of
|>play it, I don't want to back all the way out of where I am and switch
|>to the "Delete Recordings" menu, I want to just hit a "Clear" key on my
|>remote and delete the recording. Or, at the very least, I want the
|>option to delete it on the list of choices when I select the recording.
|
|
| Hit the 'D' key in the 'Watch Recordings' screen.  Also, I believe
someone has
| added a pop-up menu to that screen now, which lists some of the more
common
| functions.

Thanks! I didn't notice D in the keys.txt file at the top, I only saw it
listed in EPG section, my bad. I'll just need to map it to a IR button.

|
|>I have a lot of little usability issues like that. It's not that I want
|>to duplicate the Tivo gui, it's just that I'm lazy and don't like to
|>arrow all over the gui. It's too modal, I should be able to take any
|>action that's possible for the current context.
|
|
| [snip]
|
|
|>Which brings me to a final issue: XMLTV is a great piece of work, and I
|>hope nothing gets in the way of that. And I know it might be considered
|>rude to scrape Zap2It's site repeatedly, but MythTV really falls down
|>here compared to Tivo for guide accuracy because once a day's worth of
|>listings are downloaded, that day is never updated. An extreme example
|>is that my next 2 weeks of TBS listings are off by 3 hours since they
|>were downloaded before Zap2It made the correction. I'm not aware of a
|>simple way to update my database to correct that so I'm faced with
|>waiting to get past the stale listings. A less extreme example is any
|>one of the myriad program changes that happen with a week or less
|>notice, and TBA listings. Of course, Tivo updates the entire set of
|>listings each day, but Myth doesn't update at all. Whatever was on the
|>listing more than a week in advance is what will stay there, no updates
|>or corrections as the actual day approaches. I'm not sure what to do
|>about it, it's not a technical problem, it's an etiquette and abuse
|>issue. Tivo has seen my money, but Zap2It hasn't.
|
|
|
| Actually, the way it works is that mythfilldatabase will always grab
the next
| day's listings, plus any that are missing from the next 7.  So, on a
system
| that runs mythfilldatabase every day, each day's listings are grabbed
exactly
| twice -- once when it's 7 days out, and once when it's 'tomorrow'.
I'm not
| sure on those specifics, but it's something like that.  If there are any
| programming changes in the intervening week, the updates will be grabbed
| before the show airs.  For truly last-minute updates, you're on your own.

I found the problem. Since the name of the channel changed, I simply 
needed to edit the appropriate tv_grab_na config file in the .mythtv 
directory. I haven't chacked yet to see if this change messed up 
anything significant in the database.

btw, is there a handy place to change the default number of days (7) 
that the tv_grab_xx scripts use? I could do a crude hack to pass "--days 
14" but would rather just add the value to a config file. This shouldn't 
cause any more net traffic other than the initial fill, and I'm used to 
having more than 7 days in the guide. (I hate seeing a show advertised 
10 days in advance and having to wait a few days before I can set it to 
record. ;)

Thanks for the reply!

- -James

| -JAC
|
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