[mythtv] Extra column user-ID in MythTV

Erik Arendse erik_nospam.arendse at bigfoot.com
Fri Feb 14 10:20:03 EST 2003


Hi Isaac & All,

Seems your private mailbox is overflowing and you are still following this 
list, and as I'd like to raise some fellow-European support or suggestions 
I'll just repeat my previous mail verbatim at the end.

I also noticed a 'Julian' sending a patch to this list, but as you didn't 
want any extra columns, his patch was against 0.7, and he left out the 
database stuff it will probably not be incorporated, am I right? The only 
response on the list was from Matt Zimmerman in suggesting to add a new 
column to the channel table, which is exactly what I want as well.

Functionality like excluding certain channels from EPG and channel up/down 
could then even be implemented using the same channel by leaving the column 
empty for unwanted channels. In Europe we could enter a number to be used 
as a remote-button and sortorder ID, in the US as personal sortorder or 
just filled with something/nothing to mark included channels.

 From here on follows my original request:

>Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 10:30:04 +0100
>To: Isaac Richards <ijr at po.cwru.edu>
>From: Erik Arendse <erik.arendse_nospam at bigfoot.com>
>Subject: Extra column user-ID in MythTV
>
>Hi Isaac,
>
>Heard from Bjorn you didn't want any channelnumber for European TV in 
>myth. Any constructive ideas how to support the following in a different way:
>
>Background:
>
>In Europe TV's are programmed in a random order, channelnumbers are only 
>used while programming the TV after you bought it or moved to a new city. 
>Some sets don't even have channelnumbers but use the raw frequency. A lot 
>of stations are not on a round channelnumber, but somewhere in between 
>channels.
>A sample from my cable company's info for the main 5 national stations:
>
>         'Nederland 1'  channel 5  freq 175,25
>         'Nederland 2' channel 7  freq 189,25
>         'Nederland 3'  channel 11 freq  217,25
>         'RTL 4' channel 45- freq 662,25
>         'RTL 5' channel 47+ freq 683,25
>
>(the 45- means 'somewhat beneath' europe-west grid-channel 45 etc.)
>Everybody programs these channels on all their sets and VCR's on number 1 
>to 5.
>
>To state the possibly obvious again: I suppose if you buy a TV in the US 
>you can use it out of the box. Over here that is _not_ possible, you have 
>to sit with the manual for 15 minutes (for some a few hours :-) and 
>program the channels you want to view into the 'memory-slots' of the TV. 
>Cheap TVs have 12 slots, nowadays 30, normal TVs have 59 or 99 slots. Very 
>oldfashioned TVs (30 years and older?) have sometimes only 6 (six!) 
>hardware trimmer-potentiometers and use a system of switches to choose 
>between them.
>
>We need quite a lot ID's overhere in MythTV, nearly all of them the same 
>as US use. If you can find a 100% possible mapping to the existing 
>columns, that would be even preferable of course, but I can't.
>
>- xmltv ID (this is used for map to the programprovider on the WWW, can be 
>5-digit number not related to anything you'd want visible to the user)
>- channel nr & finetuning (this is the real hardware tuning info goint to 
>the driver. Could be a single frequency, but a channel/finetuning is just 
>as usable)
>- tag name (this will be shown along the user-ID on screen when changing 
>channels and in menus)
>- full name (not really needed but nicetohave)
>- user ID (numbers starting with 1, going up to 20-50 depending on your 
>location, this is the number every tv-viewer europe knows and uses with 
>their remotes and is consistent on their _own_ sets)
>
>The most important thing is that the number-keys in europe should select 
>the user-ID, and not the channel.
>The only option without an extra column to me seems to use the tag column 
>to fill with something like
>"1 NLD 1"
>"2 NLD 2"
>"12 BRT 1"
>and add code to have the number keys optionally parse the tags if you live 
>in europe.
>But that would be ugly database use - really putting two unrelated pieces 
>of data in a single field - and make it impossible to have a future 
>user-setting to freeformat define how he would like to see the station 
>description (like "%u %t (%f)" in europe and "%c %t" where %u is user-ID, 
>%t is tag, %f is fullname, %c is channel-nr).
>
>I would really like to have this column in mythTV, it wouldn't bite the US 
>users after all.
>Any ideas?
>
>Erik



More information about the mythtv-dev mailing list