[mythtv-users] How to bulk mark old recordings as watched?

[Michael T. Dean]

On 02/01/2012 04:56 AM, John Veness wrote:
> On 01/02/2012 09:47, Christopher Kerr wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> For a long time, my recordings weren't being marked watched, but it's
>> been behaving itself since the new year.
>>
>> However, because the autoexpirer is set to expire Watched before
>> Unwatched, and most of my old recordings incorrectly appear Unwatched,
>> relatively recent recordings are being expired in preference to very
>> old ones.
>>
>> What I need is a way to mark all but the most recent, say, 100
>> recordings as watched, so that expiration may resume sensibly.
>>
>> I can imagine how I'd do it with SQL, but I thought I'd ask here first
>> in case I've missed something obvious.
> I'm not in front of my frontend at the moment, but this is probably
> something you can do with watchlists, isn't it? E.g. add all the old
> recordings to a watchlist, then mark the watchlist as watched?

Playlists.  :)

The challenge is quickly making a Playlist since you won't have a 
recording group/category/title/... (left hand column item) that shows 
only the old shows.  But, it doesn't take that long if you know some 
special tricks and get creative.

Go into Watch Recordings with it set to show most-recent recordings 
first, then go down about 100 recordings or so, then add an episode to 
the playlist (either MENU|Add to Playlist or hit NEXTFAV (by default 
"/")) and continue down the list.  If using NEXTFAV, it goes very 
quickly because it automatically moves to the next recording in the 
list--so you can just hold down "/" and add a bunch.

If, however, you have >200 recordings, it makes sense to do it the other 
way...

Go to Watch Recordings with it set to show most-recent recordings first, 
then select "All Programs", and MENU|Add this Group to Playlist.  Then, 
go to the first recording in the list (the most-recent), and remove the 
episode from the playlist (either MENU|Remove  from Playlist or hit 
NEXTFAV ("/") and continue down the list for about 100 recordings.  
Again, you can do this by just holding "/".

Once you have your Playlist populated, hit MENU|Playlist Options|Storage 
Options|Mark As Watched.

Mike