[mythtv-users] Can A Custom Recording Rule Email Matches?

[Michael T. Dean]

On 02/26/2008 11:33 AM, Drew Tomlinson wrote:
> I just had a thought and a quick Google search didn't turn up any 
> previous discussion of the topic.  In previous posts, I recall Bruce 
> Markey suggesting setting a custom recording rule to match pilots or 
> premieres and then deactivating the rule.  In this way, one could see 
> new shows that might be of interest when viewing the upcoming recordings 
> and then decide if the show was worth recording or not.  I have done 
> this and it works great when I remember to review my upcoming recordings 
> on a regular basis.
>
> Could this be taken one step further?  Is there some way to have MythTV 
> send email when a recording matches a rule.  Maybe just one email per 
> day of upcoming recordings that match a particular rule.  I highly 
> suspect this is possible but with my limited experience, I have no idea 
> how.  Has anyone ever looked into this?

You could easily set up a script to run on a cron job (perhaps 1/day or
1/wk) that sends you an e-mail with the output of
myth_upcoming_recordings.pl (only works in trunk/0.21-fixes).  This
would be much more appropriate than having the scheduler e-mail
you--which would result in the scheduler spamming you.

To get the list of inactive recordings, you'd use:

myth_upcoming_recordings.pl --recordings -1 --no_show_scheduled
--no_show_duplicates \
                            --show_deactivated --no_show_conflicts
--plain_text \
                            --heading "Upcoming Deactivated Recordings"

Note that this would show all "deactivated" recordings:

--show_deactivated|--no_show_deactivated

    Outputs information about deactivated recordings.  Deactivated
recordings
    are those that MythTV will not record because the schedule is inactive,
    because the showing was set to never record, because the show is being
    recorded in an earlier or later showing, because there are too many
    recordings or not enough disk space to allow the recording, or because
    the show you've specified for recording is not listed in the timeslot
    specified.

    default:  --no_show_deactivated

But, those others may actually be interesting to you, also.  And, by
flip-flopping the --*show_* arguments, you can have a different e-mail
for all upcoming conflicts or whatever.

I may eventually update the script to allow filtering by the actual
recording status, so you could get just inactive recordings.  If so, it
won't go into 0.21, but the patch will be something you could apply to a
0.21 version of myth_upcoming_recordings.pl.  If you don't have
0.21-fixes, yet, 0.21's release is coming fast... :)

Mike