[mythtv-users] Broadening Record Duplicates?

[Joseph A. Caputo]

On Wednesday 12 November 2003 13:31, Ben Curtis wrote:
> From what I can tell, "don't record duplicates" works by comparing
> title, episode, and description.  If the recording has all of these,
> it's added to the oldrecordings table, and matched against later.  If
> either of these fields is blank, it is not added and recorded, even
> if it may be a duplicate.  Right?
>
> So, many shows get left out because they leave the description field
> blank.  You can't compare without description because many other
> shows set the Episode name to the same value for every episode, so
> you would miss shows.
>
> That being said, couldn't mythtv validate against the current program
> guide to see if its a duplicate?  Example:
>
> - Show comes on Thursday, at 1:30AM.
>     Title: Blue Gender
>     Episode: Oasis
>     Description: None. (null)
>   This is added to the oldrecorded table reguardless of missing
> description
>
> - Show comes on again at 4:30AM
>     Title: Blue Gender
>     Episode: Oasis
>     Description: None. (null)
>   Now, this episode matches the one in the oldrecorded table, BUT it
> has a null in one of the three fields, so lets compare it to the
> programs in the guide for the past/present/future (I.E. everything in
> the programs table and/or oldrecorded table).
>
> - Some of what we find (distinct records):
>     Title: Episode: Description
>     Blue Gender: Oasis: null
>     Blue Gender: Confirm: null
>     Blue Gender: Go Mad: null
>
> - Now, since the description is null for all, and the episode is not
> the same for every record, we now know that it can be considered a
> distinct record, and can mark it as duplicate or not based on just
> title and episode.
>
> So what happens if we didn't find any other records in the guide? 
> Just consider it NOT a duplicate, and record it.
>
>
> Any reasons why this wouldn't work?


Wouldn't it be easier to make a configurable option in the Advanced 
Recording screen to indicate which fields to check to determine 
duplicates?  I had started to work on this at one point, but I'm not 
too sure of my SQL skills, and at the time I didn't have the time to 
spend monkeying with the Advanced Recording GUI (the new options 
wouldn't fit, and would force a 2nd screen, which I didn't feel like 
doing just then).  Maybe I'll revisit the issue this week.

-JAC