[mythtv-users] Wrote a script for skipping unwanted seasons of shows

[David Blevins]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 02:41:38PM -0500, Daniel Walton wrote:
> Very cool!  Is there a way to add only a few episodes of a season?  I'm in the
> process of archiving the simpsons but they aren't aired in order so I have a
> handfull of episodes from almost every season.

If you've already recorded them with mythtv, then the episodes will already be in oldrecorded and you should be good.  Based on your comments later, I'm guessing you recorded them with ReplayTV.

I didn't add per-episode skipping in, though it would be nice.  Not sure how that could be done nicely in a command-line tool.  A PHP version of this script for MythWeb would really be the best, something the scheduled recording page, but I've never worked in PHP and don't have much time to learn it.

There is still an easy way to get what you want; install webmin and muck with the episode table using their web gui.  That's probably what I would do.

> I'm new to myth (still working on my install) so forgive the newbie question but
> how strict is the mythtv scheduler in terms of skipping recordings by comparing
> against the oldrecorded.  Does it just compare the show title and episode or
> does it also compare the description?  That and is there a way to view the
> oldrecorded list...maybe via MythWeb?

It compares title, subtitle, and description. Though, as I understand, the cvs version of mythtv allows that to be configured.  A word of causion though, I've noticed a lot of two-part episodes have the same title and subtitle, but different descriptions, so comparing just title and subtitle would result in not recording the second part (ouch).

> The reason I ask is because I wrote a tool to do this same basic thing (remember
> what I've recorded and never record it again) for my ReplayTV and I found that
> it was a lot more accurate if I relaxed a couple of things:
> 
> - ignore case sensitivity
> - ignore any prepending "The" or "A"
> - ignore punctuation.  Especially for the description where sometimes you get a
> period at the end and sometimes you don't
> 

I'm doing all the matching in my select statment as such:
  SELECT p.chanid, p.starttime, p.endtime, p.title, p.subtitle, p.description, p.category  
  FROM program p, episode e
  WHERE  e.title = ?
     AND e.skip = 1
     AND p.title = e.title 
     AND p.subtitle = e.subtitle

If you know of some sql magic to make it more flexible, I'd be happy to add it.

-David

> On Wed, 24 Mar 2004 david.blevins at visi.com wrote:
> 
> > I got sick of capturing seasons of shows that I already have on DVD,
> > etc. So, I worked up this little script to add unwanted episodes to
> > oldrecorded so they will be seen as duplicates and not recorded.
> >
> > You can get it here:
> >
> >   http://www.codehaus.org/~dblevins/mythtv/
> >
> > I've tested it with 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer', 'Angle', 'Futurama',
> > 'Smallville', and 'Farscape' with good success.  Occationally the data
> > from epguides.com doesn't match that from XMLTV and shows get recorded
> > that were supposed to be skipped.  Doesn't happen very often and it's
> > pretty easy just to delete them afterwards.
> >
> > Enjoy.
> >
> > --
> > David Blevins
> >
> 

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