[mythtv-users] Original air date

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 16:04 John P Poet <jppoet at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Gary,
>
> For the last year (it seems) original air date has been missing for any new, OTA show for all of my local stations.  I would like to figure out why.
>

(responding while mostly occupied with other things going on
(typed most of this while on a train), so I probably have some
details slightly off).

If I understand the question, it (or a related one which led to this
question) was asked on IRC quite a few months ago (FD, I only
scan the IRC logs once every few weeks (sometimes a month)),
and resulted in a set of private emails that was exchanged (email
because IRC had been set to block anonymous people due to
spamming, so to answer at all was email).

Anyway, working per spec at the front side.  There is no original
airdate in the XMLTV spec (DTD), only a previously-shown for
reruns.  As I recall, if a rerun does happen the previously-shown
date may get propagated to existing programs (there was a patch
in the past that did that, I think, although maybe I am imagining
that).  The XMLTV "new" field is defined in the spec to be the
very first showing of an entire series (so once per series), so is
not usable here to help things out (i.e. the Schedules Direct
idea of "new" is different than the XMLTV definition of "new").
btw, even "previously-shown" has a whole set of special
circumstances as to what it means per guide provider.

Those that would like to see the original-airdate in xmltv (and
perhaps a new-showing field(*)) should work to change the spec.
I think I can say with some assurance that if the spec was
updated some grabbers might update their codes to pass it
along (if the upstream provided it), but as the grabbers are
validated that they meet the DTD as part of a (past) CI
process, first step has to be to fix the spec.

I don't recall the details (and don't really have time to look at
it on a 6" screen), but at the end of mythfilldafabase, there
is an attempt to determine both new and repeat episodes even
if they are not explicitly specified, *AND* it attempts to fill in
some missing original airdates.  It is possible that that code is
broken, or not optimal, for your use case (or the data available).

If I am not understanding the question (or my memory is
failing me and some of what I said is not (or no longer)
accurate), please re-ask, and I'll try to review things again
in another few days.

Gary


(*) Be extremely careful about your definition of "new-showing",
as there is more than one channel who considers something
new when they edit it for content, or it is the first showing on a
non-pay channel.  Off hand I have no idea if Gracenote
curates the definition of "new-showing" to be what you want
it to be, and I have no clue at all how other guide providers
determine what they mean by new.