[mythtv-users] Interesting false match

Bruce Markey bjm at lvcm.com
Thu Dec 22 19:52:30 EST 2005


Al Mcintosh wrote:
...
>>> I know the Titles are the same I was just commenting on the fact that
>>> they are different as one is House Type "movie" Catagory Drama and one
>>> House  type "Series" (SH688359) category Mystery.
>>>   
>>
>> What duplicate matching policy were you using?
>>
>>  
>>
> 
> Check for duplicates in: All recordings
> Duplicate Check method: Subtitle and Description

My apologies, this has nothing to do with it. There are way too
many responses on this list by 'I'm not a doctor but I play one
on television' types ;-).

Your point is that the title for the movie and series both matched
even though there is a seriesid. The implication is that it should
just match the showings by seriesid instead. David Engel and I both
assumed this would be a good thing too and started to work on it but
after searching for test cases, it turns out this isn't a good idea.

First, not all program types have seriesids and no XMLTV grabbers
provide them. Therefore we would have to use both methods side by
side. This would slow things down, make the code harder to maintain,
etc. Movies and most sports don't have seriesid so a rule for
M*A*S*H the series would exclude the movie but an All rule on the
movie would still match episodes of the series. I said 'most' sports
because we found that while "College Basketball" is usually a cat_type
"sports" but some stations have a series titled "College Basketball"
for their coverage of a team or conference. Someone could set a
rule to record Duke games only to find that it would record some
games but not others.

Seriesid would be a good thing when the title changes like "Joe Schmo"
to "The Joe Schmo Show" to "Joe Schmo Show" or "Extreme Eliminations"
to "MXC". This suggests that we should use seriesid for SpikeTV but
there are other issues. The programid and seriesid are not created for
the sake of public domain DVR schedulers but rather were created
as database row identifiers several decades ago. The seriesid is the
row that hold the production info for the series. If that information
changes, they just add a new row with the new info and new episodes
are associated with this new seriesid. So, "Family Feud" with Richard
Dawson has a different seriesid than "Family Feud" with Richard Karn
and neither matches Louie Anderson's shows.

For almost all series, it doesn't make any difference if you match
by title or seriesid, the result would be the same. However, when
there is a difference, surprisingly it would more often do the
wrong thing by trying to match seriesid than it would by matching the
title. Worse yet, it would be much harder for the user to understand
why it recorded some "Family Feud" on GSN and not others and why
it recorded all the Gonzaga games except the one I really wanted to
see on Saturday.

So, "Deal or No Deal?" No deal. More overhead, wouldn't do a better
job and the results could be confusing. We store these and pass them
around but we don't use them to schedule. However, If you really
want to record just the old series or just the new series for
"Battlestar Galactica", this information is available and you can
create a Custom Record to match just the seriesid and not the title.

--  bjm



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