[mythtv-users] Tivo-style "suggestions" now provided by TVWish

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Sat May 28 05:46:20 UTC 2005


On Sat, May 28, 2005 at 01:03:29PM +1000, Phill Edwards wrote:
> I've installed it and modified some of the list files and run tvwish
> with v=3. I've put a line in topseries.txt of "Very Little Britain"
> and also tried it in suggest as "Suggest-Title: Very Little Britain".
> I can't get it to set it up as a recording, however, because I noticed
> that the query string requires it to be category_type='series' or 1st
> episode number or a pilot.

The suggest-title should work fine.  However, and this is something I
forgot to document, you must have programids.   Here in North America,
the listing service gives everything a programid.   For outside, I believe
the more recent versions of mythfilldatabase also create a program id.
Do you have those?
> 
> What I'm trying to do is tell it to record a program called Very
> Little Britain whenever it sees it on TV. I don't care whether it's a
> pilot episode or not. I noticed that in my program table category_type
> and syndicatedepisodenumber and subtitle are all null. So how should I
> set up the rules to do this? Or am I trying to do something it's not
> designed for.

To do a specific wish for something with no subtitle like that you
use the "Show:" wish.   It's really very similar to the movie wish,
but it doesn't deal with a  year or insist it be a movie.
> 
> PS - I'm in Australia so my EPG data doesn't come from zap2it or
> anything like that. It's generated from a web site scrape.

I have not been able to test.  Check your database for programids.  If
you don't have them, some functions won't work, but I was of the
impression everybody had them.

To test suggestions, run in test mode and suggest several hours.
You may not get your top choice on the first round -- it is deliberately
random -- but if you don't get it after several rounds of testing
something may be going wrong.

As to why the programids?   Well, MythTV was not originally written with a
means to say "Record this _show_" where a show means a particular show,
be it a movie or a special or a particular episode of a series.  You
can ask to record a title (which works for movies and specials but not
series) and you can ask to record a show at a specific time (which loses
the ability to switch to alternate showings).   However, somewhere around
0.16 it got the ability to do a general SQL query as a recording, so
I use the programid, which in zap2it land is a descriptor unique to
a "show".   I could use "title/subtitle" but in fact this is what
the programid is designed for.

Eventually, myth will probably get a more official "record show" and
I'll stick to that.    Tivo only offers three choices -- record show on
channel, record series on channel, and record wishlist, and that actually does 
decently, though it's not as powerful as mythtv's set.




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