[mythtv-users] Enabling multirec borks usability a bit.

[Michael T. Dean]

On 04/22/2010 11:57 PM, DOUGLASPEALE08 wrote:
> From: "Michael T. Dean"
> > We still need to fix it so users never, ever, see IDs.
>
> No! Please don't do this! Not all my tuners are equivalent, or on the 
> same source, but some channels are available on several tuners.
> When a recording goes bad it is absolutely necessary that I be able to 
> associate the recording to the appropriate tuner/input to be able to 
> debug the problem.
> If you must hide this information, please have an easy way to extract 
> this data from the affected recording. A debug mode is not sufficient, 
> I need to be able
> to determine from the recording which tuner/input was used the first 
> time it fails, not turn on a debug mode and hope it fails again.

You all never see channel IDs and that's not a problem.  Why?  Because 
the channel IDs are irrelevant because we make available the important 
information you /do/ need (channel number, callsign, description, etc.).

Similarly, you never see cardinput.cardinputid***, record.recordid, 
storagegroup.id, videometadata.intid, and ...  (I could go on and on and 
on) and it's not a problem.  Instead, in most of the other cases where 
we have IDs, you actually see the relevant information you need (and 
what it means to you) rather than a key in a database that ties together 
records in different tables.

The database IDs are /not/ user data.  Users should never ever be 
concerned about them.  They should instead use logical names that can be 
understood and can be specified by the user and can be constant 
/regardless/ of configuration changes over time.  You don't need to know 
card IDs.  You only think you do because we never provided the 
information you /do/ need.

What I'm proposing would actually make it /easier/ to figure out which 
recording came from which card--as the identifier would /not/ be an 
ephemeral identifier that changes with system configuration.  You could 
give /meaningful/ names to each card and each input and ...  And, we 
could actually store the information about the card that was used to 
record the show (and it would remain meaningful, even in the face of 
configuration changes).

Mike

***And in the case of cardinput.cardinputid, you don't see the important 
information that you /do/ need to figure out how Live TV chooses card 
inputs, so you have to just know how you configured things years ago.  
This is one of those things that would be corrected if we quit showing 
people IDs and instead showed them the information they need and what it 
means to them.