[mythtv-users] Should Videos be considered Recorded?

[Raymond Wagner]

On 5/20/2013 11:13 AM, Frank Feuerbacher wrote:
> On 5/19/2013 10:24 PM, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>> On 05/19/2013 10:17 PM, Frank Feuerbacher wrote:
>>> I have pointed  my mythtv Videos to my XBMC movies in the hope that 
>>> I could easily see what movies I have already recorded in the 
>>> mythweb movie listings. But, this does not appear to be the case. 
>>> Can someone confirm this? Is there a way to accomplish what I am after?
>>>
>>> I can see the XBMC movies in mythtv. I initiated a scan of them to 
>>> get the metadata. I saw the metadata for some files, but had to 
>>> manually initiate fetching for individual movies with the keyboard 
>>> shortcut "w" (perhaps I did not wait long enough for the scan to 
>>> occur). Anyway, I can confirm that the movie "You Can't Take it With 
>>> You" has it's metadata downloaded into Mythtv, but Mythtweb does not 
>>> indicate that it has already been recorded when I look at the TCM 
>>> schedule.
>>
>> Unfortunately the metadata you get for your movies is different from 
>> the program listings data you get for TV, so it's very difficult to 
>> match up videos with broadcast movies in anything more than a naive 
>> title (and possibly subtitle) type comparison. Even with TV recording 
>> history, we re-record episodes because of similarly non-exact 
>> matches.  This, however, has the advantage that you end up recording 
>> something you don't need, after which you can delete it without 
>> watching (and get an exact match for future airings that have 
>> similarly broken program data).
>>
>> So, the best you can do is tell MythTV you already recorded those 
>> movies.  The simplest way to do so is to find the movies in the 
>> Upcoming Recordings page of MythWeb and click on "Never record." That 
>> puts the movie into MythTV's recording history--complete with its 
>> unique program identifier--and tells it not to record, as if you had 
>> recorded the episode.
>>
> I'm guessing that there is no tool to let me mark a list of movies as 
> "never record" from a script.

You could write a script that would check the upcoming recordings list, 
pick out items that it thought were duplicates, and either add a 
one-time override, or add an entry that marked that specific metadata as 
having already been recorded.  However, what Mike is explaining is that 
simply having the episode name itself is not ideal for duplicate 
matching.  MythTV prefers to use the programid if available, which will 
be specific to a single guide data provider, falling back to matching on 
title/subtitle/description by default.  It's unlikely you'll find all 
three match between data coming from two different providers.