[mythtv-users] if (x!=rerun) {record}

[Michael T. Dean]

Fred Squires wrote:

> On 10/20/05, *Todd Houle* <thoule at wesleyan.edu 
> <mailto:thoule at wesleyan.edu>> wrote:
>
>     I need a little help running a reruns rule.  I'd like the following
>     rule for recording, but I can't seem to find where/how to enter it.
>
>     I'd like to record a show and keep at most 4 episodes of it.  If
>     there's anymore, don't record them until I watch the old (this part
>     I'm doing).  However, if it's not a rerun, then record it anyway -
>     either delete and old one, or just record it in addition.
>
> Right now there's no way to do that, other than manually doing it.
> It would be great if you could give new episodes a higher priority

In SVN, you could create a custom record rule for new episodes only and 
assign a priority for that.  Then, create a rule for old episodes.  Or, 
assuming you do this after creating the custom record rule for new 
episodes, just create a rule for record all.  If you use the same rule 
type (i.e. this channel or all channels) for both, the all episodes rule 
must be created after the new episodes rule so it can match first.  If 
you make a more specific rule for the new episodes (i.e. use this 
channel for new episodes and any channel for all episodes), it doesn't 
matter what order they're created in.

Then, assign priorities to the rules as desired.

I hope I got this all right, but I'm sure Bruce Markey will chime in 
with corrections to any misinformation here...  He's the man with the 
answers for recording rules--especially custom recording.  ;)

> and then tell the scheduler to keep at most maybe 5 episodes and 
> record new and expire old if the new episodes priority is greater than 
> or equal to the older episode's.  Lower priority should always be 
> deleted before higher in this case, so that way a non-rerun will be 
> recorded over a rerun instead of an older non-rerun.

OK.  I don't know much about how auto-expire works, but I think you can 
specify an auto-expire priority (or, perhaps it uses recording rule 
priority to determine auto-expire priority, or maybe both approaches are 
options...).

However, I know if you have two rules--a new episodes rule and an 
"anything else" rule--you can specify that new episodes should not be 
auto-expired and reruns can be.  You can also specify a max episodes for 
the all episodes rule.

> It would work well for the shows like the simpsons, that way you could 
> always have different repeats to watch but they would never delete the 
> new episodes when you don't get to them for a while.

Feel free to report back your experiences.  ;)

Mike