[mythtv-users] Question about recording history

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Wed Jun 13 15:25:37 UTC 2007


On 06/13/2007 10:53 AM, Brian Walter wrote:
> Michael T. Dean wrote:
>   
>> On 06/13/2007 10:00 AM, Brian Walter wrote:
>>     
>>> I've been trying to figure out if this is possible, and so far, no luck.
>>>
>>> After using several DirecTivos for several years, the wife was asking 
>>> about 'Delete' and 'Delete and allow re-record' and how these relate to 
>>> Tivo's 28 day rule.
>>>
>>> We notice that if we do a 'Delete and allow...' if the same episode is 
>>> on on a different channel the next day, it will be picked up.  We are 
>>> wondering if it is possible to basically say 'Don't record if the 
>>> episode was recorded in the past X days'.
>>>       
>> We don't (yet) have anything like that.  Adding that behavior shouldn't
>> be too difficule, though.  Feel like writing some code?
>>     
> Point me in the right direction :)

Well, I can point you in a direction.  Others will have to say whether
it's the right direction.  :)

The approach I would use would involve adding a column to oldrecorded
called something like "dupdate" (a datetime with a default of NULL). 
When the user deletes a show with the 28-day rule (or whatever you
implement), the value of that field is set to the time at which
duplicate = 1 matching should be ignored.  And, it would be easy to add
another daily "cleanup" task to the housekeeper to set duplicate = 0 and
set dupdate to NULL once dupdate passes, if desired for performance,
ease of implementation, or just "DB cleanliness".

The hard part would be changing the big, ugly scheduler query to respect
the new field.  You could add a check where now is not NULL and now >=
dupdate.  Or, if we don't care about having less than 1-day precision,
we could just rely on the daily cleanup to flip the value of duplicate
and wouldn't need to touch the scheduler query.  (I would try to get
approval for using the housekeeper to set duplicate = 0 since the
scheduler query scares me.)

With this approach, it would be easy to add code to Previously Recorded
to allow the user to say, "Allow re-record after" and specify a value of
1 week, 1 month, 6 months, 1 year or whatever.  Whether the devs would
allow adding new options to the end of playback prompt is another
question (many agree that > 4 options is too many), and I (a non-dev)
would vote against changing the delete and allow re-record to default to
some time in the future or to pop up a new dialog asking "when" (I want
my one-click access to "this episode didn't air on time, so get it again
as soon as possible").  However, it may be possible to add an option to
the delete confirmation in the Watch Recordings/Delete Recordings
(playbackbox) screens allowing the user to specify when to re-record.

Note, also, that really, you should get thoughts from Bruce Markey
and/or David Engel as they are the ones who would review the code for
possible inclusion.

Mike


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