[mythtv-users] How to bulk mark old recordings as watched?

[Christopher Kerr]

On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 9:25 PM, Michael T. Dean <mtdean at thirdcontact.com> wrote:
> On 02/01/2012 04:56 AM, John Veness wrote:
>> On 01/02/2012 09:47, Christopher Kerr wrote:
>>> Hi everyone,
>>>
>>> For a long time, my recordings weren't being marked watched, but it's
>>> been behaving itself since the new year.
>>>
>>> However, because the autoexpirer is set to expire Watched before
>>> Unwatched, and most of my old recordings incorrectly appear Unwatched,
>>> relatively recent recordings are being expired in preference to very
>>> old ones.
>>>
>>> What I need is a way to mark all but the most recent, say, 100
>>> recordings as watched, so that expiration may resume sensibly.
>>>
>>> I can imagine how I'd do it with SQL, but I thought I'd ask here first
>>> in case I've missed something obvious.
>> I'm not in front of my frontend at the moment, but this is probably
>> something you can do with watchlists, isn't it? E.g. add all the old
>> recordings to a watchlist, then mark the watchlist as watched?
>
> Playlists.  :)
>
> The challenge is quickly making a Playlist since you won't have a
> recording group/category/title/... (left hand column item) that shows
> only the old shows.  But, it doesn't take that long if you know some
> special tricks and get creative.
>
> Go into Watch Recordings with it set to show most-recent recordings
> first, then go down about 100 recordings or so, then add an episode to
> the playlist (either MENU|Add to Playlist or hit NEXTFAV (by default
> "/")) and continue down the list.  If using NEXTFAV, it goes very
> quickly because it automatically moves to the next recording in the
> list--so you can just hold down "/" and add a bunch.
>
> If, however, you have >200 recordings, it makes sense to do it the other
> way...
>
> Go to Watch Recordings with it set to show most-recent recordings first,
> then select "All Programs", and MENU|Add this Group to Playlist.  Then,
> go to the first recording in the list (the most-recent), and remove the
> episode from the playlist (either MENU|Remove  from Playlist or hit
> NEXTFAV ("/") and continue down the list for about 100 recordings.
> Again, you can do this by just holding "/".
>
> Once you have your Playlist populated, hit MENU|Playlist Options|Storage
> Options|Mark As Watched.

Thanks Mike - I figured something like that was possible, it was the
NEXTFAV key trick I needed.

593 recordings are now eligible for auto-expiration, starting from June 2010!

Handy trick for disabling auto-expiration of a whole series after the fact, too.

- Chris