Season record

[Loki047]

I would love to have something like that.. FOr me that is the only thing missing from GB-PVR (after playing with some ofther software, i came right back)

Mastro, share your wisdom?

[KingArgyle]

There are certain types of shows where the duplicate checking will actually not work if you go by the Unique Id. If you record news programs, or daily shows like talk shows etc. These types of shows all use the same unique id. Ideally, this should be on a recording by recording basis.

Any duplicate checking is going to run into this type of problem. Many show descriptions repeat (i.e. College Football, NCAA Basketball, etc.). Is the duplicate checking configurable? I.e. I want it to check for duplicates on this show, but not the other show? Any possibility of getting it to work with XMLTV by checking the show Name and the description?

[Maestro]

Sure, I'm happy to share my code, but as King Argyle has pointed out, there are some complications.  I'll need to clean things up a bit, as I went lazy and hard-coded some files/directories that are specific to my box.  Also, I haven't actually integrated anythign into GB-PVR: I just run this once a night.

It's not been heavily tested, as I've only used it on shows that I actually record.  I'll try to scrub it out a bit, find a way to automate it, and post it up.  I'm moving back up to school (Christmas break is ending) on Monday, so prepping for that might slow me a bit.  I shoudl be able to have it up some time next week.

King Argyle, in response to your question, I currently only check for the program id.  However, I could easily add checks for anything.  Let me summarize how it works:

The program is run with 0+ command line arguments.  Each argument should be the file name of a recording you want to check.  For each arg, my program parses the show title, start time, and end times, and pulls a listing for that time-slot only from XMLTV.  I then run through the list of programs searching for a match on the title.  When a match is found, *all* of the listed data is exported to a .info file, which has the same prefix as the .mpg created by GBPVR.

Then, I open the EpisodeList file, check to see if the program id is already listed.  If it is, I delete any files with the same prefix as the mpg.  If not, I add the program id to the EpisodeList.

It's rough around the edges, but there's no reason I couldn't output extra data into the EpisodeList file.  XMLTV gives a lot of info, including Title, Subtitle, syndicatedEpisodeNumber, OriginalAirDate, Description, and more.  not all values are present in all listings, but it would be trivial to add more values to my EpisodeList.  An example could be:

ProgramID - Title - Subtitle - Description

I could still run a string comparison check to see if that composite strign as a whole matched up before I deleted anything.

There are a few special cases that I'm not sure can be dealt with: if a program is being aired simultaneously by 2 different channels, my program will just pull the info from the first listing in the XML doc, which could conceivably mis-label and/or misdelete the mpg. Also, characters that are not allowed in a file name muck things up a bit: episodes of Whose Line is it Anyway? don't register, because the file name of the mpg doens't ahve the '?', but the XML doc does.

But that's enough rambling for now. Thoughts/comments?

[Maestro]

On a different note, should I continure technical discussion here, or start a new thread in the Developer's forum?

[KingArgyle]

Maestro,

If you want. I'd be interested in putting this in as a utility along with the External Recording Manager. Since it is written in Java it would be farily simple to convert it to C#. I have a similiar utility that I have started writing for duplicates, but I'm always of the philosophy why re-invent the wheel.