[mythtv] Predictive text input method

[Colin Guthrie]

Ian Campbell wrote:
> I did some experiments (with a crappy Perl script) over my mp3
> collection (around 200 albums) on Sunday I posted some stuff here but it
> was caught by the list filters (too big) and I was on my way out the
> door and I never managed to trim it down and post it again.
> 
> The script did a depth first search across the possible numeric pad
> inputs, and creates a regex by mapping 2-9 to the letters (and numbers)
> marked on my remote, 0 to "0" or whitespace and 1 to everything else (so
> 1 and punctuation basically). It stopped when the list of matching
> albums (artist and title) reached <8 (which was my target for fitting on
> a TV screen).

Is there any reason to stop it at 8 result? I know what you mean in that 
the human factor takes over, but would your method physically prevent 
any further characters being entered? This is relativly arbitrary though 
when I think about it, as it would have to be the UI use of the 
underlying search mechanism that does the limit, so you could easily 
pick and chose to limit the input or simply display "No matches" 
depending on preference I guess.

Also, how do you think is best to present "search term" box in UI terms? 
Showing the REGEXP is obviously not on from an non-techie acceptance 
point of view unless it is a simplified version of the regexp. This 
could be quite an awkward bit unless you have some bright ideas 
already?? My brain doesn't seem to be able to think at the moment!!

> The maximum key sequence that was required to bring the match list down
> to <=8 with my collection was 7 and for the nearly all of the albums the
> most sensible things you would enter when looking for them took just 4-5
> keys to produce a useful shortlist. 
> 
> The matches of length seven were all, without exception, (a) albums by
> "various" or (b) artists/albums named "the be_" which matched "the best
> of..." (mostly), "the beatles" and "the bends". If you searched for the
> artist whose "best of" you wanted, or just "beatles" or "radiohead" you
> got the match in less than 7 entries.
> 
> Most of the sequences of length 6 were the same, partial matches on
> "various" and titles etc starting with "the".
> 
> The results of the experiment were encouraging enough (to me) that I'm
> intending to continue digging with the internals of mythmusic to see how
> it works out in practise.

For what it's worth, this is quite a generic interface, so I think it 
would be worth while to try to incorporate a generic implementation into 
libmyth rather than poking specifically with just mythmusic. Anyone agree??

It is fairly safe to say that this will run of the DB (by that I mean 
the search terms are in a db field) and use the built in REGEXP stuff in 
MySQL. If so, the libmyth class or whatever it turns out to be could 
accept some form of SQL input perhaps?

Also, there are quite a few patches just now to allow multiple database 
backends, so although MySQL has REGEXP, do you know what e.g. the 
postgresql equiv. is? I've not used postgres much so don't really know 
but it should be a consideration!

This is really cool! I've been wanting this for ages!!

Cheers

Col

-- 

+------------------------+
|     Colin Guthrie      |
+------------------------+
|  myth at colin.guthr.ie   |
| http://colin.guthr.ie/ |
+------------------------+