orignal air date, season and episode numbers

[carpeVideo]

I noticed there is space for these in the database.

Assuming they come from the guide xml what is the preferred syntax for these fields and will NPVR do something with them (including writing them to the metadata?)

[sub]

Unfortunately it doesnt really do much with these fields at the moment. The season and episode numbers werent available in the dozens of EPG samples I had a available, so I didnt get very far down that path. It did implement support for reading a couple formats of season/episode in xmltv files ('onscreen' and 'xmltv_ns' formats), but never got as far as being able to test it.

[mvallevand]

I wrote a program that tries to populate the season/episode from TVRage based on airdate and/or episode (subtitle) name but currently NPVR removes these fields once the show is recorded and the EPG is rebuild.

Martin

[sub]

Yeah, its not safe for you to update fields in the database.

[markbb1]

I noticed there is space for these in the database.

Assuming they come from the guide xml what is the preferred syntax for these fields

XMLTV DTD supports one date field that I am aware of and two forms of series/season-episode numbering schemes (and Sub addresses the amount of support he has provided for each of these in an earlier post in this thread). Per the XMLTV DTD for the "date" field:
The date the programme or film was finished. This will probably be the same as the copyright date. <The sample date provided was 8 numeric characters in the format yyyymmdd>
Per the XMLTV DTD for the series/episode schema:
There are two predefined numbering systems, 'xmltv_ns' and 'onscreen'.
xmltv_ns is intended to be a general way to number episodes and parts of multi-part episodes. It is three numbers separated by dots, the first is the series or season, the second the episode number within that series, and the third the part number, if the programme is part of a two-parter. All these numbers are indexed from zero, and they can be given in the form 'X/Y' to show series X out of Y series made, or episode X out of Y episodes in this series, or part X of a Y-part episode. If any of these aren't known they can be omitted. You can put spaces whereever you like to make things easier to read.
(NB 'part number' is not used when a whole programme is split in two for purely scheduling reasons; it's intended for cases where there really is a 'Part One' and 'Part Two'. The format doesn't currently have a way to represent a whole programme that happens to be split across two or more timeslots.)
Some examples will make things clearer. The first episode of the second series is '1.0.0/1' . If it were a two-part episode, then the first half would be '1.0.0/2' and the second half '1.0.1/2'. If you know that an episode is from the first season, but you don't know which episode it is or whether it is part of a multiparter, you could give the episode-num as '0..'. Here the second and third numbers have been omitted. If you know that this is the first part of a three-part episode, which is the last episode of the first series of thirteen, its number would be '0 . 12/13 . 0/3'. The series number is just '0' because you don't know how many series there are in total - perhaps the show is still being made!
The other predefined system, onscreen, is to simply copy what the programme makers write in the credits - 'Episode #FFEE' would translate to '#FFEE'.

and will NPVR do something with them (including writing them to the metadata?)

See Sub's reply in an earlier post.