[mythtv-users] one show known by more than one name

[Michael T. Dean]

On 05/13/2010 01:51 PM, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-05-13 at 13:40 -0400, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>    
>> Title is always a factor in duplicate matching.  If a show is
>> retroactively renamed, it will break duplicate matching
>>      
> As I thought.
>    
>> but in such a
>> way that you re-record episodes (so false negatives
>>      
> Indeed.  Not the worst of the possibilities.
>
> Given that at least once source of scheduling information (SD) provides
> a "unique id" type of field which appears (in this case at least, so
> perhaps for all intents and purposes) to be independent of cosmetic
> metadata such as episode titles, subtitles and descriptions, wouldn't it
> be useful to provide that as a duplicate matching option?
>
> Or is the Program ID not as useful in this regard as I am imagining it
> is?
>    

If both episodes have a program ID, that is used as the definitive 
identifier of the episode (i.e. user-specified duplicate-matching method 
is ignored).  That said, the scheduler /only/ matches duplicates where 
titles match--otherwise, in theory, they're not the same show, 
regardless of program ID.

Besides, for XMLTV users, we often make up program ID's and nothing 
would prevent duplicate program ID's across different show titles, so we 
can't just change it.

See, also, 
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/169129#169129 for a 
much better description of the issues than I could provide.  (Note that 
seriesid is the "SD prefix" you mentioned.)

Mike