[mythtv-users] Tivo-style "suggestions" now provided by TVWish

[Brad Templeton]

I have done a preliminary implementation of a "suggestions" system
in TVWish, the super-wishlist program for MythTV.   If you use
or install TVWish, you can enter a couple of simple commands to make
it generate a certain number of hours per day of suggested recordings,
based on both tastes learned from past recordings, and more explicit
tastes you describe in the file.

People either love or hate Tivo's suggestions feature, though many
just don't understand it.  Suggestions in TVWish run at a -90 record
priority so they never supersede any explicitly requested recording,
and they use a +100 autoexpire number so, as long as you have autoexpire
on, they never take away disk space from other recordings.  (Though at
least until I modify MythTV itself, they make the disk report as full
in the Delete menu and of course df sees the disk as full.)

Suggestions are an alternative to surfing.  Your spare disk space and
spare recording time is used to grab a variety of programs which
more closely match your tastes than just the random grab-bag of what's
on live TV when you go to surf it.   Many people find that just watching
your explicit requests has less variety than they like.  Suggestions
are often a miss, but sometimes they are a hit and even open you to
new programming.

(My long term goal, however, is to use TVWish's critic feature, which lets
you download recording requests -- and shortly suggestion preferences -- from
a web URL, so that others can recommend new shows for you.)

As of now, the implementation is young and not perfect.  Only limited
training is possible on your old recordings, mainly primary genre and
title.   Suggestions do use up a tuner, so if you go to watch live TV
during a suggestion, you need to kill the suggestion.  (Tivo invisibly
kills any suggestion underway if you go to watch live TV.)  Right now
suggestions don't look much different, other than they appear in their
own recording group.   I plan to modify MythTV so that all programs with
a super low record priority or super-high autoexpire number display
differently, as this would be useful for more than these suggestions.

I encourage folks (especially existing TVWish users) to try it out.  If you're
not using TVWish, you will probably enjoy its many features as well.
Install is very simple.  (Suggestions are not on by default in the basic
install, you need to edit a file to turn them on.)

Down the road I or somebody will make a GUI interface for this stuff,
probably in mythweb.

Some extra suggestion abilities I added include the ability to ask for
pilot episodes of all sorts of shows to be common suggestions, and to
include movies as suggestions based on star-rating -- so you will get
random 4-star movies.  Of course, if the suggestions are a dud, you just
delete them or do nothing and let them automatically expire.

    TVWish is documented here:

        http://www.templetons.com/brad/myth/tvwish.html

    The new suggestions system is documented here:

        http://www.templetons.com/brad/myth/suggest.html

There are links to the install instructions, and the tarball for download.
Basic install on most MythTV systems is as simple as unpacking the tarball
and typing "make install" -- this will get you a large movie, top episode
and pilot episode wishlist.   Please send any comments or bug reports to
me or the list.