[mythtv-users] Enhancement request: Movie-debut years and original air dates in themes

[Yeechang Lee]

I followed the advice at
<URL:http://outflux.net/blog/archives/2005/10/23/mythtv-original-air-date-visibility/>
in order to have the theme I use (Retro) show the original air date of
TV episodes appear in the program description for each
recording. (There's no need any more to patch
programs/mythfrontend/globalsettings.cpp; I just changed
Appearance|Localization|Date Format to "Day Mon DD YYYY.") I really
like having the original air date (I also long ago set Playback|View
Recordings|Sort Episodes to "Original Air date") visible without
viewing the Program Details page and urge Gerhard and other MythTV
theme maintainers to consider making this simple change.

However, this causes movies--which don't have Original Air Dates, per
se--to show the date of the recording itself as the original air
date. (I get the impression from
<URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/139647#139647>
that ORIGINALAIRDATE for all recordings that don't have original air
dates in the DataDirect feed is populated with the recording date.)
For any such recording, the year the movie first debuted of course
makes more sense, and this is information that is indeed available in
the DataDirect feed; it appears in Program Details, after
all. However, YEAR, although it appears in libs/libmyth/uitypes.cpp,
for some reason doesn't work in the place of ORIGINALAIRDATE; nothing
appears.

The ideal situation, which I suspect will take a small patch in
addition to the theme patch I mentioned above, would be something like
this pseudocode:

if SUBTITLE != "" then
   if ORIGINALAIRDATE != "" then
      print (SUBTITLE," ",ORIGINALAIRDATE,"\n",DESCRIPTION)
   else
      print (SUBTITLE," ",YEAR,"\n",DESCRIPTION)
   fi
else
   print (STARS,",",YEAR," ",DESCRIPTION)
fi
   
The result would be something like this.

Example 1: A TV show.

How I Met Your Mother
161 KPIXDT     Mon Jul 10 2006, 09:30 pm - 10:00 pm
"The Pineapple Incident" (Mon Nov 28 2005)
Ted relies on his friends to fill in the gap . . .

Example 2: Another TV show. This last example is only theoretical; I
don't know if there are any non-movies that only have years and no
original air dates listed, and the _Gilligan's Island_ reruns I've
seen do have complete original air dates.

Gilligan's Island
54 TBSP
"The Sweepstakes" (1965)
Gilligan wins the lottery and then loses the ticket.

Example 3: A movie. Note how the year is moved into the stars section,
à la TiVo, in order to not waste a line just to show it.

Woman of the Year
51 TCM	     Thu Oct 19 2006, 11:14 pm - 01:16 am
(3.5 stars, 1943) A New York sportswriter . . .

-- 
Yeechang Lee <ylee at pobox.com> | +1 650 776 7763 | San Francisco CA US