[mythtv-users] How to handle schedule pre-emptions?

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Fri Apr 29 21:39:07 UTC 2005


On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 03:50:25PM -0500, Kevin Kuphal wrote:
> makalu at ansae.com wrote:
> 
> >
> >So the President held a one-hour news conference last night, then each 
> >of the networks did their own thing afterwards. For example NBC 
> >dropped the 8:00 shows and went right to The Donald, while CBS showed 
> >everything delayed. As a result, the zap2it-provided schedules were no 
> >longer accurate. Is there any way to handle this if you had previously 
> >scheduled recordings whose times were now all wrong?
> 
> I listened to the news and added a one time recording for CSI to catch 
> Survivor, etc.  Nothing is going to be able to automatically adjust for 
> that in Mythtv because the guide data isn't that dynamic.

Well, if some brave volunteer wanted to offer a service to notice pre-emptions
and broadcast database updates for the networks, I could produce code
to read these off the web or an e-mail to update the database.

A mailing list seems the most efficient, but it means that each user
has to know how to redirect a mail or an alias into a process (such as
a perl script.)  That changes from system to system so it's not really
possible to have it slotted in out of the box.

Far less efficient would be polling a web address.  That could work out
of the box but it's a _lot_ less efficient and depends on you polling in
time.

But the main thing is somebody willing to be the trusted party who
sends out updates.    You would write up the updates in something
similar to the SQL that would be executed.

You would need to be trusted, signing the mail with a key such as
using pgp, because the simplest way to do this is to just let the trusted
party provide SQL fragments to work on myths' databases.   We could
bump the security a bit and only allow a specific set of changes
(such as change start and end time, delete program entry and create
program entry) but in fact there is virtue in allowing a trusted party
full rewrite on the program table and more complex changes.


Pre-emption moves are just one example.  One could have another list
correcting well known errors.   For example, 2 weeks ago, the data on
"The Daily Show" went wrong -- it only provided the generic episode
data, not specific episode info.  If you were set to record only new
episodes, you would have missed them.  Somebody could have fixed this
for other users, particularly easily if given full access to the program
table. (And perhaps programgenres and programrating and credits to be
complete.)

For additional security, the database user involved could be a new one
with access only to those tables.

I can write the code -- but who wants to be the master of real time
database corrections?


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