[mythtv] Wishtv (expanded Mythwish) -- adding ability to do abridged series

Brad Templeton brad+mydev at templetons.com
Mon Jan 24 22:52:58 EST 2005


I've added quite a bit of functionality to my wishlist program.  (I've
renamed it wishtv because the syntax has changed and it's not really
a direct MythTV module.)

In addition to the past features of movie wishlists, importing critic's
lists from the web and finding first episodes, I have put in a bunch of
series related abilities.

The most important, I feel, enables a new type of TV watching I have
been experimenting with over the past year or so.   When I watch a
series that is not one of the rare truly great ones, I find a list of
the shows rated by quality.  (Many shows have fan sites that do that.)

Then I watch the series, but only the best episodes.  I don't bother to
watch the turkeys.  If the series is one with plot continuity, I can
read what happened on the same fan web sites, though this works best with
shows without deep plot continuity.

It's remarkable how much better TV shows are when you never see the
bad ones.  Life is too short to watch bad TV.

As such, I've integerated it so that you can take a list of episodes for
any series, put them in a file, and WishTV will make Myth record them
when they come on.  You can either make an edited list yourself, or you
can take a list with embedded scores or ranks (which can be downloaded
from a variety of web sites) and just tell it "Record the top 50 shows"
or "Record shows scoring more than 8" etc.  This is not for every series,
but it's amazing how much better it makes some shows.

I have put in some sample files for Futurama and Angel as starters.  I
will build more and I hope others will do the same.

There's a nice website called www.geos.tv that has rankings for the
episodes of almost all major Fantasy/Science Fiction shows.

Also new:
    Along with this, a function to tell it to not record episodes that
    come later than where you are recording now.  This is handy if a
    show is being aired at 2 points in its life, perhaps one in
    syndication, the other in "live," or even two points of syndication
    as you will find for Stargate, buffy etc.

    It scans your list of episodes, and stops once it has missed a few.

    Perhaps for the same purpose, you can now also request all episodes of
    a series that aired before a given date.  So if you started watching
    "The Simpsons" in 1995, you could have your Myth box record any
    earlier ones if they show up.

    Default commands, so it's easier to make files of movies, or episode
    titles.  Generally you just stick all the titles in a file and put
    a couple of header lines on it.

    A "Stop" command to tell it to ignore the rest of a file.  Another
    way to get it to record only the earlier episodes of a show.

    A new syntax, with tags and options added to lines with keyword=value,
    which is more extensible.   Some tags like movie years and show ranks
    will still be parsed freeform from files.


You can find the general description of the new program and the perl
source at:

    http://www.templetons.com/brad/myth/wishtv.html

And particular notes on how to do a "good parts only" abridged TV
sereies at:

    http://www.templetons.com/brad/myth/abridging.html

I welcome comments and enhancements before letting non-dev users test
out the program.  It works with 0.16 and I presume with CVS, I don't
know if it works with older versions of Myth.   It still needs better
conflict abilities on TV Episodes (needs FindOneEpisode based on
title/subtitle or programid instead of just FindOne based on title).

I'm glad Myth has finally let me automate what I've been doing manually
for years.  I get various opinions on abridging TV series and what
people think of it.  More rationales are in the web page.  Some get
offended that I would not want to watch the bad episodes of their
favourite shows, some love it.

In the future, it will go further, and deal with live TV.  In that
case, you will record each new episode of a show, but the earlier
people to watch it will vote on it (thumbs up/down etc.) perhaps
right from their remotes and the menus of Myth.   Those votes will
be tabulated, and if the show's a real stinker, your machine will
download that, and tag the episode or even delete it outright.  In
theory a bad show could get just a few brave watchers and die before
it has even aired on the west.  Likewise a really good show would get
more viewers who see tags blessing it, or even getting it recorded
if it airs later for them.

This changes the nature of series TV, which has been based on series
fandom, unlike TV and movies, where we seek opinions on how good
something is before we watch or read it.


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