[mythtv-users] Groups, multiple viewers and the watched icon

[Michael T. Dean]

On 12/28/2009 12:59 PM, Tim Ashman wrote:
> On Monday 28 December 2009 09:48:03 am Robert McNamara wrote:
>   
>> On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 9:42 AM, Tim Ashman wrote:
>>     
>>> Hey, I'm running mythbuntu 9.10 myth .22
>>>
>>> My kids and I share just this one myth backend/frontend.  I was wondering
>>> is there a way to create a group for each of us, then have the watched
>>> icon show by groups so that if I watch a show it shows a watched icon for
>>> my group but not for the groups for my kids and vice-versa.
>>>
>>> We like a lot of the same shows and it is hard to know when we can delete
>>> a show.
>> No, not presently.  For this to really work properly, Myth would need
>> to support multiple users.  There was a Summer of Code project several
>> years ago that aimed to make Myth multiuser, but the author failed to
>> complete his work.  It would be a lot of work to complete the project
>> since much of myth's code is based on per-host settings and not
>> per-user settings.  If someone out there is looking for a truly
>> worthwhile project to get started in Myth development (although
>> admittedly a huge one), this would be an awesome choice.
> I guess I could have multiple front ends hooked into the tv..  haha  kinda 
> over kill but then each one of us would just pick their "input" to the tv, we 
> would still share the backend (it is seperate now) 

Though actually the watched flag is stored on a per-recording 
basis--it's not even per host.  Robert was mentioning that we'd need 
per-user support before getting per-user, per-recording support.  :)

So, for now, about the only thing you can do is use recording groups like

Dad
Watched - Dad
Mom
Watched - Mom
Kids
Watched - Kids
Watched - Dad and Mom
Watched - Dad and Kids
Watched - Mom and Kids
Watched - Dad and Mom and Kids

but, as you can probably see from the above, that gets very complicated 
very quickly when you have more than 2 "users" to be concerned about...

Though, with the new-in-trunk event-based subsystem, you could use 
events to send out a message when mythfrontend is started (i.e. a 
"login") and when it's stopped (a "logout") (likely using custom 
key-based events to allow different logons), as well as after playback 
is stopped, then have some asynchronous message-processing script 
determine which user has watched which shows and record the information 
somewhere...  Though, admittedly, this approach would not only involve 
running trunk code on production, but would require a lot of development 
of message-handling code.

Mike