[mythtv-users] Groups, multiple viewers and the watched icon

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

    > Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 14:53:02 -0500
    > From: "Michael T. Dean" <mtdean at thirdcontact.com>

    > Though, with the new-in-trunk event-based subsystem, you could use 
    > events to send out a message when mythfrontend is started (i.e. a 
    > "login") and when it's stopped (a "logout") (likely using custom 
    > key-based events to allow different logons), as well as after playback 
    > is stopped, then have some asynchronous message-processing script 
    > determine which user has watched which shows and record the information 
    > somewhere...  Though, admittedly, this approach would not only involve 
    > running trunk code on production, but would require a lot of development 
    > of message-handling code.

Huh.  That's an interesting way to do it.  I can see (for starters) a
simple kluge that modifies the program description to tack on things
at the end like "[Mom's watched this]", which gets put there if
"enough" minutes have been watched and the tag isn't already there...
(Yes, yes, this will break duplicate handling if you don't have
programid's available, so it'll only work for Schedules Direct users
who get accurate data.  I -said- it was a kluge... :)  [But it avoids
having to write any new support for putting more information somewhere
in the UI.]

It also suggests a relatively simple way (assuming one frontend per
person, such as in a bedroom---picking a different "login" button on
a remote is too easy :) of exercising what some might call Orwellian
control and some might call "good parenting", which is very
fine-grained monitoring of someone's viewing habits.  At the very
least, you could probably pretty easily compute "this frontend has
been playing video for n hours today."  Whether that's meaningful (and
whether you assume "rapt attention" or "background noise") depends on
what you're using it for, of course.

All in all, though, the new event system has a lot of promise; I've
been working around the lack of a generalized hook system in Myth for
a long time, and I'm really, really happy Chris has implemented this.
(Those who are not on -dev should check out [1] for the intro.  (And
[2], which is my feature request/request for opinions for events at
the start of longrunning things like mfdb and scheduling [the event
system already notifies about their ends] and about a "backend-idle"
thing that might be handy for, e.g., backup systems that don't want to
run while recording and don't want to have to parse port 6544 etc;
once I have a trunk devo system, I may work on adding those.)

[1] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/commits/414798
[2] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/dev/414822?page=last