[mythtv-users] Should Videos be considered Recorded?

[Michael T. Dean]

On 05/20/2013 11:13 AM, Frank Feuerbacher wrote:
> On 5/19/2013 10:24 PM, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>> On 05/19/2013 10:17 PM, Frank Feuerbacher wrote:
>>> I have pointed  my mythtv Videos to my XBMC movies in the hope that 
>>> I could easily see what movies I have already recorded in the 
>>> mythweb movie listings. But, this does not appear to be the case. 
>>> Can someone confirm this? Is there a way to accomplish what I am after?
>>>
>>> I can see the XBMC movies in mythtv. I initiated a scan of them to 
>>> get the metadata. I saw the metadata for some files, but had to 
>>> manually initiate fetching for individual movies with the keyboard 
>>> shortcut "w" (perhaps I did not wait long enough for the scan to 
>>> occur). Anyway, I can confirm that the movie "You Can't Take it With 
>>> You" has it's metadata downloaded into Mythtv, but Mythtweb does not 
>>> indicate that it has already been recorded when I look at the TCM 
>>> schedule.
>>
>> Unfortunately the metadata you get for your movies is different from 
>> the program listings data you get for TV, so it's very difficult to 
>> match up videos with broadcast movies in anything more than a naive 
>> title (and possibly subtitle) type comparison. Even with TV recording 
>> history, we re-record episodes because of similarly non-exact 
>> matches.  This, however, has the advantage that you end up recording 
>> something you don't need, after which you can delete it without 
>> watching (and get an exact match for future airings that have 
>> similarly broken program data).
>>
>> So, the best you can do is tell MythTV you already recorded those 
>> movies.  The simplest way to do so is to find the movies in the 
>> Upcoming Recordings page of MythWeb and click on "Never record." That 
>> puts the movie into MythTV's recording history--complete with its 
>> unique program identifier--and tells it not to record, as if you had 
>> recorded the episode.
>>
> I'm guessing that there is no tool to let me mark a list of movies as 
> "never record" from a script.

No.  You could write a script to go through your listings and find any 
of the titles that air during the available listings period (usually 
about 2 weeks future and one week past) and then create a never record 
rule for the show.  Using the Python bindings ( 
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Category:0.26_Python_Bindings ) to do this 
would be the best approach--but still not an easy task as there's no 
simple API for creating recording rules.  (In truth, you may even be 
better off using the Python bindings script to find the movies in the 
listings, then having the script send a Never record request to 
MythWeb--which already has its own implementation of recording rule 
creation...)

This approach allows you to determine whether the show is, in fact, the 
one you want to never record.  (Meaning you become responsible duplicate 
matching.)  So, when you run the script and finds there's a showing of 
the 1983 movie "Independence Day" with the same title as a movie in your 
Video Library airing on this (or some other "old movies" channel) and 
your script marks it as "Never record" and then later the 1996 movie 
"Independence Day" airs and it's not marked in MythWeb as having been 
recorded, so you create a rule to record it and "waste your 
time/space/electricity/whatever you're afraid of wasting", you only have 
yourself to blame.  ;)  (Or "Twilight", "The Patriot", "Death Race", 
"The Punisher", "Rage", "The Unborn", "Dead End", ...)

Basically, though, you can only mark shows to never record if they 
appear in your listings.  Anything else is too loose a match quality for 
MythTV to say, "You've already recorded (or never recorded) this show."

Mike