[mythtv-users] hash

[Jan Ceuleers]

On 15/03/2020 06:21, jam at tigger.ws wrote:
> Hi
> 
> we have a feature that I think is silly, over the years has on many occasions caused me great grief. Not to list identical hash files more than once. (scan fails to find a file)
> 
> The chance of two unrelated files having the same hash is a million to one. Terry Pratchtte wrote
> 'the chance of a million-to-one event happening is 9-in-10'
> 
>  After yet another hour long session I decided to remove that 'feature;. Alas it is not so simple.
> 
> Someone put
> 
>         // I deleted the incorrect SQL select that was supposed to get
>         // host name from ip address. Since it cannot work and has
>         // been there 6 years I assume it is not important.
> 
> in the code right where the hash is gathered.
> If they (or anybody else) can say a line or two I'd appreciate it lots. I want to totally disable the hash mechanism.
> 
> Please no kind words saying 'you really don't want to do that'

I can't answer your question, but agree that this is a problematic
feature which has also caused me problems.

That, and it prevents me from organising my video library in more ways
than one: I would for example like to create additional views using
symlinks (e.g. recently added, or a split into box sets and movies, or a
split by decade, etc).

Still: I see that the videometadata.hash field is a varchar(128) yet is
populated with only 16 hex digits. So if you're only interested in
further reducing the risk of collisions between unrelated files, what if
you fire up your random number generator and put a much longer random
string in that field? If we keep our fingers crossed perhaps that will
do what you want without code changes (and hopefully also without
crashes due to buffers being too small).