[mythtv] expanding the recorded table?

Bruce Markey bjm at lvcm.com
Fri Jun 27 19:26:51 EDT 2003


Neil Trodden wrote:
...
> The problem is, how do you detect a repeat?

You can only work with what you have access to. What Isaac did
is to compare the subtitlie and description. If either field is
null they are not considered for a match. This isn't foolproof
but it does a reasonable job for the given data. The actual data
from the clearing houses (GemStar, TMS) have database record IDs
that uniquely identify each episode description. Access to
episode IDs would certainly make things easier but they normally
aren't exposed in web pages for users to look at (However, some
TV listing sites do expose these IDs in href tags as get string
to pass to their applications).

There are also episode numbers that come from the show's producers.
Many databases include these in a field. However, not all shows
have episode numbers and there is not a cosnistant numbering scheme.
The databases do have to have a record ID for every description
of every movie, special, series, etc. so this is probably a more
useful identification than episode numbers.

> Even if you delete the video 
> file
> and store the description, the description will surely change if a 
> repeat is
> shown a month later (different person doing the write-up).

Actually, this isn't as much of a problem as you might think.
Once a service enters a description into their database for a
specific episode ID, you will always see that same description
for that episode from that service. When you do see a different
write up for the same episode, it is probably because it
originated from a different service.

--  bjm



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