[mythtv-users] Zap2it Labs: Temporary scale-back to 3 days of listings

Nick knowledgejunkie at gmail.com
Tue Feb 14 07:47:56 UTC 2006


On 13/02/06, Michael T. Dean <mtdean at thirdcontact.com> wrote:
> On 02/13/2006 05:29 PM, Brandon Beattie wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 11:23:57AM -0500, Tom Lichti wrote:
> >
> >> Zap2It-Labs wrote:
> >>
> >>> I guess I'm used to some people downloading hundreds (or
> >>> even thousands) or times per day, totally pointlessly, from DataDirect,
> >>> thinking they're getting updated data (I guess).
> >> Sounds like you could gain a lot by limiting people to one download per
> >> day, or maybe a max of 3. Just refuse the download on the 4th (or more try).
> > Another possible way to fix this is don't let someone download twice in
> > under 26 hours.  This way it forces everyone to change download times or
> > only lets people download every 2 days at the same time.  I'd even go
> > for 78 hours or something.  Myth could easily track this and could
> > reschedule when it knows it can download data again.
> >
>
> However, mfdb downloads 1 day at a time, 2 times per video source
> (tomorrow and 13 days from now).  So, the logic becomes far more complex
> for TMS...

This is why I've suggested both on the mailing list - recently here
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/177363  (and on
trac - oops) that mythfilldatabase be reconfigured to allow importing
from a single data source/file against multiple video sources to stop
the requirement for having to redownload listings multiple times if
sources contain different listings of channels.

The data is in XML format - it's not difficult to skip adding data
(and creating new channels) when running MFDB on a source that
contains a smaller subset of channels than the data contains.

However, as a non-cpp coder, my ideas do not count as being useful
suggestions. I'd imagine support for something like this is now more
important than ever in light of the recent zap2it changes. Having to
redownload identical data is clearly inefficient, both in terms of the
extra burden on the source server, and when re-running MFDB. I
understand there will be subtle nuances between using zap2it and
xmltv-based grabbers, but there seem to be the same underlying themes.

Nick


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