[mythtv] Removing scheduled recordings

[Chris Pinkham]

> I've been trying to follow this but I'm getting confused.  There are a few
> different ideas getting intermingled.  Could someone who has been privy to
> the IRC discussions summarize where the actual development is headed?

We're basically talking about Myth's current ability to avoid duplicate
recordings and how to enhance that.

Currently when a show finishes recording, a record is inserted into the
oldrecorded table to indicate the show/episode was recorded.  If the
episode was recorded because of something like an Anytime or Timeslot
recording and the same episode comes on say 6 weeks later as a re-run,
then Myth will not re-record the show because the entry exists in the
oldrecorded table.  The episode is shown in Grey on the "fix conflicts"
screen and is marked as "suppressed".

We are talking about ways to implement the following XXXXXX ideas:

1) Give user the ability to Unsuppress a recording in case they
	decide they do want Myth to record it a 2nd time (like when
	you "accidentilly" delete your wife's copy of the season finale
	of Friends before she had a chance to watch it).  This
	functionality exists currently by deleting the record from
	the oldrecorded table as if the show was never recorded the
	first time.
2) Give user the ability to manually suppress a episode without
	recording.  This is useful when you realize you've already
	seen that episode of Seinfeld 20 times already and don't want
	to "waste" space recording it this time while you're on
	vacation.
3) Give user the ablity to always record episodes from a certain
	show whether they've been recorded before or not (except in
	cases where they were recorded and still exist in Myth
	because they haven't been deleted yet).  This is useful
	when you want to record every episode of Seinfeld whether
	you've recorded it before or not.


Idea #1 already exists but the way it is implemented might be changed
if it made sense.  Ideas 2 & 3 are what's being discussed and how
best they could be implemented.

> My two and a half cents FWIW...

We haven't even begun to discuss your Tivo/Replay scenario where
Myth would try to "guess" what we want to watch and use free space
to record things we haven't told it to record.  I don't know
what people's ideas are on that, but it will need things like
the auto-deletion code in place before this is implemented.  I
believe someone is/was working on auto-delete, but needed a
gui to give users the ability to configure it.  Part of the
options might go on the advanced recording screen after that's
put into place, but not sure about the rest since I don't know
exactly what options it will make available.

> - Ability to have the system forget it ever recorded a given show.

This is covered by #1 above as you stated.

> - Ability to mark programs such that those recordings are not added
> to oldrecorded at all.  That would allow for the Tivoesque program
> ring for marked programs.

This is maybe an modified/enhanced version of #3.

> - One added function would allow for much less manual intervention,
> the ability to mark recordings as deletable, and to mark a program's
> default deletable state.  That way, auto deletion as the disk fills
> would be relatively easy to add.

This will come with the auto-delete code at some point.

The concept of prioritizing recordings is also being discussed as to how
can we better determine what show gets recorded if you have say 3 shows in the
same timeslot but only 2 tuners available.  This would kind of go along
with your default deletable state since if I don't care much about whether
a show gets recorded or not, then I probably don't care whether it gets
auto-deleted to make space for that season premier of some new show I
want to watch.

Hope I did a decent job of explaining it.  Lots of ideas and a 100 ways
to implement them, just need to figure out what makes the most sense
and then for someone to submit a patch. :)

Chris