[mythtv-users] Broadening Record Duplicates?

Steve Davies steve at one47.co.uk
Wed Nov 12 16:00:59 EST 2003


Ben Curtis wrote:

>>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
> 
I'm sure it would work, except:

* In the UK, my current guide provider only provides 4 days data, which does 
not provide a fair sample for this technique.
* If one week someone decided to enter a description in the guide data, all 
bets are off until that entry has expired from the guide. This would cause the 
dups checking to flip-flop its behaviour some weeks.

Not sure I like the risk involved in that ;-)

On the other hand, I do think that we should de-dupe even where there are 
NULLS if (and only if)
1) Start time/date is identical
2) End time/date is identical
3) xmltv guide ID is a) set and b) identical

This would prevent "all-recordings" from recording across discreet sources 
that are available on separate cards and have access to the same channels. eg. 
Ch1 - BBC1 on terrestrial, Ch101 - BBC1 on NTL cable.

Regards,
Steve

-- 
Steve Davies                   steve at one47.co.uk

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