[mythtv-users] Broadening Record Duplicates?

[Ben Curtis]

>From what I can tell, "don't record duplicates" works by comparing title,
episode, and description.  If the recording has all of these, it's added
to the oldrecordings table, and matched against later.  If either of these
fields is blank, it is not added and recorded, even if it may be a
duplicate.  Right?

So, many shows get left out because they leave the description field 
blank.  You can't compare without description because many other shows set 
the Episode name to the same value for every episode, so you would miss 
shows.

That being said, couldn't mythtv validate against the current program 
guide to see if its a duplicate?  Example:

- Show comes on Thursday, at 1:30AM.
    Title: Blue Gender
    Episode: Oasis
    Description: None. (null)
  This is added to the oldrecorded table reguardless of missing 
description

- Show comes on again at 4:30AM
    Title: Blue Gender
    Episode: Oasis
    Description: None. (null)
  Now, this episode matches the one in the oldrecorded table, BUT it has a 
null in one of the three fields, so lets compare it to the programs in the 
guide for the past/present/future (I.E. everything in the programs table 
and/or oldrecorded table).

- Some of what we find (distinct records):
    Title: Episode: Description
    Blue Gender: Oasis: null
    Blue Gender: Confirm: null
    Blue Gender: Go Mad: null

- Now, since the description is null for all, and the episode is not the 
same for every record, we now know that it can be considered a distinct 
record, and can mark it as duplicate or not based on just title and 
episode.

So what happens if we didn't find any other records in the guide?  Just 
consider it NOT a duplicate, and record it.


Any reasons why this wouldn't work?

Ben