[mythtv] What is an "episode" ? What is a "part" ?

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Mon Nov 19 16:38:53 UTC 2012


On 11/19/2012 09:47 AM, Stuart Morgan wrote:
> On Monday 19 Nov 2012 09:36:59 Daniel Thor Kristjansson wrote:
>> On 11/16/2012 08:01 AM, Håkon Alstadheim wrote:
>>> I find I confuse myself more on this question the more I think about
>>> this. I get shows with descriptions like "(2:3)" , "(2:3/s4)" or
>>> "(2/s4)". I've also seen "Sesong 4. (2) ", indicating episode 2, total
>>> number of episodes 3, and season 4 in those examples. Other variations
>>> also exist. This system is fairly new in my part of the world, so I have
>>> never seen how "part 2 of episode2" would be marked.
>>>
>>> My question is: should I use the above strings from the description to
>>> fill in "syndicatedepisodenumber" AND also partnumber and parttotal ?
>>> Why is one a string and the others integers ?
>>> What would it take to change myth into storing episodes, parts, seasons
>>> and total episodes in a consistent way? -- That is, how is this
>>> information used by myth ?
>> The partnumber and parttotal are the
>> episode number and number of episodes in a series and is
>> intended to inform algorithms needing to know that info.
> My understanding was that it was specifically for multi-part episodes sharing
> the same episode ID/subtitle, so that the scheduler would record both parts
> instead of treating the second as a duplicate?

Yes, for example, a mini-series with the same title and subtitle and 
even program ID that's aired in 2 or 3 parts or whatever.  Note, though, 
that the same could apply for multi-part episodes of regular series 
that, perhaps, were originally aired as a special one-hour episode and 
are later re-aired as 2 half-hour episodes or whatever.

> There's unquestionably a lot of confusion around these three columns and there
> always has been. At the very least I'd back dropping syndicatedepisodenumber
> in favour of discrete episode #, series # fields (these already exist but are
> currently reserved for metadata grabber supplied values). Renaming the part*
> columns with more descriptive names would also be good. Either episode #,
> total_episodes OR episode_part, episode_totalparts depending on what the
> intention is here.

Note that syndicatedepisodenumber is not what most people would consider 
an episode number.  It's the production-company-internal value used to 
identify the episode during production.  It's a string because it uses 
whatever format the production company chooses--and very often contains 
non-numeric characters.  For example, these are a few of the ones I have 
RS024, SAS108, SW051012.  Grabbers shouldn't fill it out unless they're 
given the actual syndicated or "official" episode number.

Note, also, that as Daniel mentioned, it's never used internally for any 
decision making--it's just "informational".

Mike


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