[mythtv-users] Alternatives to DataDirect?

[John Biundo]

Isaac Richards wrote:
> They've stopped limiting the data (see their forums for the announcement). 
> 
> However:  Please, don't everyone go out and manually refresh their data right 
> now.  Just let myth update it automatically as it normally would.  It won't 
> make any difference at all to the data you'll get, you won't miss any 
> recordings, and won't cause a bigass spike on their servers.
> 
> Isaac

Welcome news.

I have no idea how big a "part of the problem" MythTV users are.  They 
simply didn't provide enough information.

That said, it would be terrific if we, as a group, made a strong effort 
to be self-policing good citizens.  When the inevitable time comes for 
zap2it to make changes to their service (they state in their latest 
announcement that the underlying problems remain and will need to be 
addressed), our good standing might help shape their solution to be 
"mythtv-friendly" (i.e., they already indicate that they like MythTV's 
day+1 and day+13 download model; maybe they can offer their service in a 
way to encourage (or force) *all* users to do this kind of optimization).

There's been so much information (and perhaps misinformation) thrown 
about, I'm not sure it's entirely clear what "best practices" are in 
this regard.  For example somewhere (one of the official docs or perhaps 
an unofficial how-to) I got the notion that I should run 
mythfilldatabase as a cron job.  Which I do.  Which means I am neither 
randomizing my download time, nor am I utilizing the acknowledge() 
function to be a better citizen.  I've also seen references to shell 
scripts that randomize download times.  Perhaps most of these are 
leftover from earlier releases where Myth didn't have the automatic 
download scheduler feature built in.

I'll go figure out how to move from the cron job to using the built-in 
scheduler.

I'm suggesting that there be some high-visibility communication (ie., 
from Isaac would be best, IMHO) explaining the issue and how to comply 
with best practices.  As Tom at zap2it mentioned, all those who were 
likely to comply with this behavior with a little nudge have probably 
already done so.  A highly visible announcement might provide the larger 
nudge to move the rest of us, and set the expectation going forward for 
new users.  Reviewing installation and howto docs (the rest of us, not 
Isaac ;-) to make sure they spell this out would also be a good idea.