[mythtv-users] Companion to "Max episodes" setting...

[chris at cpr.homelinux.net]

One of the problems I have with the current system of recording 
priorities and auto-expire methods is that it's fairly rigid in the 
way it ranks shows.  People's opinion of the relative value of 
recordings is a little more variable.

For example, "The Simpsons" and "South Park" both run several 
different episodes every day.  If my recording rules had anything 
but the lowest priority then they wold dominate the schedule and 
anything else having a lower priority would never get recorded.  In 
the absense of a maximum episodes limit, they would hog all the 
disk space.

The fact that they are so common and so easy to record means I want 
to record them as a "last resort" capture, but that doesn't mean 
they are of such little value that I want them to all be 
auto-expired.  For example, I always record movies at a fairly high 
priority.  Each movie would cause 4 to 6 episodes of "South Park" 
to be expired.  If I was running the system in a "drive full" state 
(as Dean says we should) then I could go from a system full of 
"South Park" to having no episodes at all in a single day, assuming 
the right movies came along.  As the number of episodes gets 
smaller and smaller, the relative value of that recording becomes a 
little higher.

The solution to that problem would be to have a "min episodes" 
setting for each rule as well.  That would tell the auto-expire 
routine "when there are only X episodes of this show left, they are 
no longer elegible for auto-expire".

Part of the justification for this is that movies will always be 
more valuable than cartoons if you have a hard drive full of 
cartoons, but eventually you end up with a drive full of movies and 
no cartoons, and their relative value is inverted.  You don't 
always have time to watch a full-length movie, and it would be nice 
to be able to guarantee a certain amount of mindless entertainment 
for when you've got 30 minutes to kill.