[mythtv-users] Zap2It needs our help

[David Rees]

Jarod Wilson wrote, On 6/13/2004 11:01 PM:
> On Jun 13, 2004, at 22:08, Chris Petersen wrote:
> 
>>> It's in the General setup in the frontend, fourth (last) page.  Check
>>> the "Automatically run mythfilldatabase", and then fill in the settings
>>> that appear...
>>
>> ahh, sweet, thanks.  Would have thought it would be under "TV".
>>
>> so all things considered, wouldn't it be best to set the default times
>> to 1 -> 24?  So it runs randomly at some point during the day?  (could
>> add code to the random such that it would never run less than 12 hours
>> apart, etc)
> 
> I had that same thought, but also the same concern -- I wasn't sure if 
> there was a possibility it'd run at 23:59, then again at 00:01 or 
> something, so I just went with a 3-hour window in the afternoon, since 
> from zap2it's chart, it doesn't look like much of anybody is hitting 
> them at that time. I like your idea though, and I think you could take 
> it one step further, and remove the choice to select the time period, 
> just make everyone's system fetch data randomly each day, but at least 
> 12 hours apart from the adjacent days' fetches.

Thanks for the tip Jarod to use the built-in mythfilldatabase scheduler. 
  I've set mine to update from hour 0 to 24.

I agree that it would make sense to add some sort of randomization in 
there, but not necessarily a good idea to take away the option for 
people to schedule the update at a time they might prefer.

I like the idea of it picking a random time each week to run 
mythfilldatabase, as that will help make sure that random times are 
chosen for updates and if for some reason things aren't quite random 
they will automatically randomize update times on their own.  I think 
that with this scheme you could ignore the occasions last weeks updates 
occurred late and the current weeks happen early, or you could 
reschedule the event halfway between the last one and the next one.

-Dave