[mythtv] Manual Recordings and metadata lookup

[John P Poet]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 2:16 PM Steve Erlenborn <
simon.sinister at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> On 3/23/21 8:36 AM, Peter Bennett wrote:
>
> On 3/22/21 1:49 PM, Roland Ernst wrote:
>
> A user reported [1] that for manual recordings, the subtitle is filled in
> by a date-time object.
> This causes problems when retrieving the metadata data, because the options
> " -N title date-time" is not required for the metadata grabbers [2].
>
> What is the reason to fill in the date-time to the subtitle field?
> What use cases are covered / supported by this convention?
>
> [1] https://github.com/MythTV/mythtv/pull/336
> [2] https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MythTV_Universal_Metadata_Format
>
> Roland
>
> Manual recordings have no access to the subtitle, so it is likely that the
> developers used that instead of leaving subtitle blank. I would think that
> manual recordings do not normally use metadata lookup. If metadata lookup
> is used for manual recordings perhaps we should ignore subtitle on manual
> recordings or ignore subtitle if it contains a date-time. I think that
> calling the grabber with -N title date-time is not valid.
>
>   I am the user who mentioned that <grabber> -N <title> <date-time> always
> fails for
> Manual recordings. That's not fatal. The mythmetadatalookup program
> proceeds to run
> <grabber> -M <title> to get an inetref value. Then it runs <grabber> -C
> <inetref> to
> retrieve general metadata information on the TV series.
>
>   No, it's not accurate to "think that manual recordings do not normally
> use metadata
> lookup". 95% of my record rules are Manual, and they've been successfully
> retrieving
> metadata, on my system, ever since my patch, #12277 "Metadata collection
> always fails
> for Manual Record rules", was submitted 7 years ago, and was pulled into
> the official release
> 3 years ago.
>
>   At first, I thought it was pointless to be invoking <grabber> -N for a
> Manual recording
> rule, but I've changed my mind. Now, I think it was clever of the
> developers to pass
> <date-time>. When the <subtitle> string is in the form of <date-time>,
> that information
> can be sufficient to find episode specific information for a recording.
> TvMaze provides an
> episodesbydate search option. The date and time need to be adjusted based
> on the local
> timezone and the timezone specified in the database. Once that's been
> done, an exact
> match for an episode can often be found. I'm working on an update to the
> tvmaze.py
> grabber to properly support this -N <title> <date-time> syntax.
>
>   There are some limitations. The database only stores the original
> broadcast date
> and time. If the show you've recorded is a rerun at a different date or
> time, the
> search for an exact match will fail. In such a case, we won't know about
> the exact episode,
> but mythmetadatalookup will proceed to get general metadata information
> about the
> recording by using the -M and -C options.
>
>   When it succeeds, the episode specific information is retrieved,
> including
> the episode description. My hope is that this extra information will
> eventually
> get displayed. When I automatically record a series episode based on EIT
> sent over the air, there's usually a short description of the episode which
> appears when a recording is highlighted. It seems like this should also
> work
> for Manual record rules, if we can determine the specific information for
> an episode. That doesn't work yet because even when mythmetadatalookup gets
> all the information it needs from the -N invocation, it currently proceeds
> to run
> -M and -C to get generalized information anyhow. Some refinements will be
> needed in the metadata lookup code to make this work better.
>
>   It might be harder to add support for -N <title> <date-time> to the
> other new
> television metadata grabber, "TheMovieDB.org V3 television". I've scanned
> through
> the API at developers.themoviedb.org and although their database holds
> 'first_air_date',
> I haven't found an option to do an episode search based on this date value.
>
>   I think that calling the grabber with -N title date-time is valid. It
> just hasn't been
> used for anything useful yet.
>
>  - Steve
>

I also do a fair amount of "manual" recordings. I have considered adding a
dialog box to allow the user to specify a subtitle. I generally use the
ServicesAPI to add my manual recording rules, though, and that does allow
for it, so it has not made it up my priority list yet.

Slightly off topic, but some of the shows I have been recording originated
in the UK where they don't always use *unique* subtitles. There can be an
"Episode 1" in season 1 and then again in season 2, etc. What is annoying
is that mythmetadata will look for Title/"Episode 1" and just go with the
first item that matches, resulting in *all* seasons being marked as season
1! It would be nice if it noticed that the subtitle was not unique and not
set (or over-write) the season field with possibly incorrect information.
If that is too complicated, then I would settle for it just not
over-writting the season data if it already exists. If no one gets around
to that, I will probably look at doing it when I finish my current project.

John
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-dev/attachments/20210323/ca7b83d1/attachment.htm>