[mythtv-users] TV-Series DVDs

Peter Schachte schachte at csse.unimelb.edu.au
Mon Nov 5 07:58:20 UTC 2007


Christopher X. Candreva wrote:
> On Sun, 28 Oct 2007, Nathan A. Smith wrote:
>> Reading the archives, I don't see any recent discussion of how people
>> handle importing, separating, tagging, etc -- TV series DVDs.
> 
> I've been thinking about this for a while. The question that keeps comming 
> to my mind is, Why are TV, Video, and music separate modules at all, and 
> could they be combined into a single view ?

Agreed.  It seems to me that myth really makes three distinctions between TV
and Video:  TV is for TV episodes, while video is for movies; TV is for
recordings, while video is for ripped DVDs; TV is for things that are expected
to be watched and deleted, while video is for things that are expected to be
kept around indefinitely.

The trouble with this is that these distinctions don't always go together.  One
example is the subject of the OP:  TV series DVDs.  Should they be put in the
video or TV sections of myth?  What about recorded movies?  How about recorded
movies or TV programs that the user wants to keep around indefinitely?

I think the most useful distinction between Myth's TV and video sections is
whether the file should be watched and deleted, or kept around.  It's not just
a question of auto-expiration, as pointed out in another post in this thread.
You may rip a new DVDs to mythvideo, whereupon it gets lost amongst your other
movies; you'd like to have a list of newly ripped movies.  This corresponds to
the two ways I use myth:  I may want to watch something new (whether a new
recording, or a new DVD or CD I've ripped and not watched/listened to yet), or
I may want to watch or listen to a particular item.

So I think rather than unifying many of the myth plugins with myth itself, what
would be better would be a new myth component to maintain a list of "new
arrivals" (tv recordings, ripped DVDs, ripped CDs, even photos or home movies
downloaded from cameras) that I'd like to watch or listen to or view.  This
isn't quite a playlist, because I want to scroll through it to look for what I
want, like I currently do with recordings.  In fact, I'd like each family
member to have their own such list, so after I watch something, I don't see it
in my list anymore, though other family have it in their list until they've
watched it.  Once everyone who has expressed an interest in something new has
watched/listened to/viewed it, if auto-expire is selected, then it should be
moved to a deleted list and auto-expired before anything not on the deleted
list.  Things not marked to auto-expire would be kept around indefinitely, and
could be watched again by browsing the appropriate myth component.

-- 
Peter Schachte              I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, [my child]
schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU        will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you
www.cs.mu.oz.au/~schachte/  when they took freedom of the press away from
Phone: +61 3 8344 1338      the Internet?' -- Mike Godwin


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