[mythtv-users] watchlist question - "not the earliest episode"

[Bruce Markey]

First, thank you for your feedback. Here's another pile of
Watch List philosophy and implementation....

James Orr wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 8:56 PM, James Orr <james.orr7 at gmail.com
> <mailto:james.orr7 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>     On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 8:05 PM, Bruce Markey <bjm at lvcm.com
>     <mailto:bjm at lvcm.com>> wrote:
...
>     In the meantime, could you go to TV- Settings->Playback page
>     "View Recordings (4/8)" and try setting "Episode sort ordering"
>     back to the default "Sort all sub-titles/multi-titles Descending"?
...
> That was it. Works fine on the default (not sure how that got
> changed in the first place), thanks.
>
>
> OK, now I remember. I never understood why the default is to sort it so
> the new stuff is at the top. Makes no sense to me at all. Hope you can
> fix that soon, very annoying having everything backwards.

And thus the options. I believe John Poet may have added these
and others like sorting by programid or original air date.

On some late evening  the top of such a list has the evening
news and American Idol for example. The oldest recordings for
me are always the movies or specials that I've never made time
to watch and may be several months old. If someone only had ten
or twenty recordings total, oldest first may make sense but
I don't think most people would want to scroll down over dozens
(hundreds?) of recordings just to find the evening news. So,
newest at the top typically makes more sense and myth gives
you the option of reversing this (bug noted). The Delete
Recordings page dates back to the early, early days of myth
and the assumption appears to be that if you want to clear out
crud, the oldest are the prime targets.

Possibly what you want is ""Sort sub-titles Ascending,
multi-titles Descending". This would put oldest "Stargate:
Atlantis" at the top of the Stargate list but put the newest
recordings at the top of the All Programs list.

Watch List is a hybrid where I want to rank old movies vs. weekly
shows that sat for a few days vs. new recordings. As I pick off
the daily and weekly series, the old specials and movies work
their way to the top. If I'm more or less caught up on new stuff
then maybe it's time to finally watch these older recordings.

> I have another question regarding the watchlist, the "days to exclude
> weekly episodes after delete", how do I get rid of that? I can't seem to
> set it lower than 1. If I have several episodes of a show, I'd like to
> see the oldest as it currently does, but when I delete it or it gets
> marked as watched I'd like the watchlist to update with the next
> episode, not exclude it.

Understood. First, if your intention is to spend the evening
watching a few episodes of "Stargate: Atlantis" go to the
Stargate group and choose from there (to state the obvious ;-).

You may exclude or include things again with some semi- Easter
eggs.

I always allow auto-expire by default and delete shows after I
watch them. If I want to keep the show I just watched, I turn
auto-expire off, might transcode, may move to another recgroup.
However, I can imagine someone else having auto-expire off by
default then turning it on after they watch so that the system
can delete these but not the unwatched shows. Either way, if the
auto-expire changes, the user made a decision about the show and
I update the last_delete timestamp.

So if I have something at the top of the list that I know I won't
watch for a few days, I can press "I"nfo->Storage Options, click
"Disable Auto Expire" then "Enable Auto Expire". The next time
the list is refreshed, that title will be blocked out for a couple
days.

The opposite is useful too so the Preserve button clears the date
stamp. If I have two College Basketball games and delete the first
when it ends, I can go to All Programs and "Preserve this episode"
then "Do not preserve this episode". The second game will then be
at or near the top of the Watch List because it is something that
I always watch right away.

I suppose we could have a "0" days option if you'd like but it
would still need to block out for, say, an hour. The reason is
a potentially nasty problem.

Say Stargate is at the top of your list because you have eight
of them. You finish watching the oldest and choose to delete.
The popup clears but Stargate is still there. You try delete
again hoping it works this time. You've just deleted two different
episodes. Variation: you just finished watching the dramatic end
of an episode and, um, rush to take a much needed break. When
you come back, did you remember to delete? Is that the next
episode or the last episode at the top of the list? You may
need to watch part of it again to find out. Therefore, when a
title is deleted, that title needs to disappear from the list.
If the title is there, it hasn't been deleted. If it's deleted,
it's gone.

The option is the number of days for a weekly show. However, it
makes no sense to block each daily show for two days as it
would fall further and further behind. Therefore daily blocks
for several hours, 7 by default. Series with no upcoming episode
are not urgent so they block for twice as long, 4 days by default.

I hadn't thought of a zero day option until now but you may want
to give the default behavior a chance. If it didn't wait, it
would always tell you that you need to watch Stargate until you
are down to the last one. We know that you've recorded eight
already without actually watching them so it can't be important
that you watch them all consecutively today (but you may do so
regardless of the existence of the Watch List if you'd like).

The idea is that if I'm two or three episodes behind, I can watch
an episode every few days and be caught up in a week or two. My
pre- watchlist rule was to not consider a title I'd watched today
or yesterday and pick something else. However, this has a benefit
that I hadn't considered until I had this feature working.

Say FOX Reality had a marathon for "Big Brother '84: Oceania".
They show ten hours but I'm not going to watch ten hours today
so I record them and watch the first episode. Four days later
the  next one appears at the top of my list until I watch and
delete. Four days later another but if this is too soon, I can
toggle the auto-expire and it disappears for another four days.
So even though it was recorded as a marathon, I get them metered
out sort of like a weekly series. I usually have two or three of
these self scheduled pseudo series at any time. Right now I
have G4's "Unbeatable Banzuke" that I'm using as a test case
for your questions.

--  bjm