[mythtv-users] MythTV Presentation - Requesting Comments/Opinions

[Brad Templeton]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 09:57:08AM +0800, Max Waterman wrote:
> Brad Templeton wrote:
> 
> >Myth and Tivo and the rest are
> >still largely schedule oriented for non-series -- browse the movies and
> >shows that are on the schedule for the next two weeks regularly, and pick
> >shows to record. I wanted to reverse that -- list all the movies you
> >are interested in watching, and they just show up. (Sort of like you
> >might use netflicks.) But importing other people's recommendations
> >goes a level beyond that so it's what I will explore next.
> 
> I used to have (actually, I still have, but I moved while it didn't) a 
> ReplayTV and one of the things I liked about that was the  (IIRC) Replay 
> Zones. I forget exactly how it worked, but it would allow me to select 
> *types* of shows which were similar to ones I knew I already liked. I 
> think it worked really nicely - but was somewhat awkward. My roommates 
> never used it though. I think they made more use of it to record shows 
> they already liked.

Tivo's "suggestions" and the zones are both interesting features and
more useful than they seem at first.   Many of the Tivo suggestions, or
other things generated by "similarity" are completely silly, stuff you
would never watch, but that's OK if you don't set your expectations
otherwise.   What is true, however, that if you are in a mood to "surf"
you can translate it to a mood to browse stuff that is not in your
ordinary watchlist.   Most people set up a moderate number of series
recordings/season passes etc. and their disk becomes full of those
recordings, and you sometimes feel a bit burned out, "I want to watch
something different."  This is what drives people to surf, for example.

The suggestions turn out to be better to surf than the things that happen
to be randomly on right now.  And besides, they are recordings, so you can
fast-forward, etc.

I think that real human judgement is what you need to make this even
better.  You can come up with all sorts of algorithms to figure out a
person likes science fiction, or Tom Cruise or whatever and try to find
more of it.  Such things might actually be more useful for browsing upcoming
TV than random recordings.

I think amalgamating the opinion of critics and other viewers is most likely
to yield a list you would actually watch more of the time.