UK Freeview Series and episode information.

[sub]

Cheers sub, can't really survive without series link... looks like I will have to go the off-the-shelf PVR way... <sulk> ... its on the MythTV wish list as well

The existing season recording stuff isnt as bad as you make out. The current stuff isnt based a simple set time of the week sort of thing. Its based one the names of the shows and can handle differences in show times from week to week. Admittedly it cant tell if one show is a duplicate of show aired at another time (except in the US/Canada), but you can tell if to do a timeslot season recording to help avoid shows at other times of the day or different days of the week (if its likely to be a problem for that show). This timeslot is a loose timeslot, and can still cope with variances in the airing times between episodes.

This current season recording functionality works pretty well, and hasnt really had to change in the long time. I've got dozens of season recordings setup and dont get any duplicates being recorded.

[ArtificialIntel2]

lol - I guess that rules that out then...

I suspected that may be the case. Relies on the broadcasters to send the correct metadata at the right time too. Not wholly reliable as yet.

Regards

AI

[bgowland]

can't really survive without series link...

To be honest, the UK TV scheduling is normally sufficiently predictable that I'm happy with the various Season record options available (All episodes this channel, All episodes this daily (or weekly) timeslot etc.). The main advantages that I can see for Series link and Split recordings is that the first would prevent recording repeats of individual episodes in the same week or recording a re-run of a previous season - the second would automatically record both halves of a film wrapped around the evening news (yep, I still occasionally forget to record both parts :o).

Pity bgowland's reverse engineering isn't enough.

I like cryptic problems though so I'm tempted to put together a 'harvester' for this to see if I can pull enough data to cross-reference and get some more ideas. I still think it's probably all proprietary and the data is only published to the 'paying' developers.

Cheers,
Brian

[gEd]

As Brian said, season recordings works fine only sometimes the EPG data fails to carry the episode number but you can still see the recording sequence from the dates.

[ReddogOne]

The existing season recording stuff isnt as bad as you make out.

Please don't think my comments are anyway negative towards your software as I'm very impressed by it. Its better than most of the commercial equivalents I've had the pleasure of working on and from only a single person!

I think its just that I've got used to a box with a really good series link. Some channels occasionally do double episode or call each episode a different name and that's when things go wrong and as I might not really watch TV for a few days and then catch up the following week, if things go wrong I miss this weeks episode.

Having the recordings made on my office PC and watching them on my linux box connected to my main TV is just so cool! So I still intend to use your SW to record programs on channels without many repeats (record all) and stuff like family guy which missing an episode doesn't matter and take the pressure (as far as disk space is concerned) off my Sky+ box.

[ReddogOne]

I suspected that may be the case. Relies on the broadcasters to send the correct metadata at the right time too. Not wholly reliable as yet.

I'm sure the meta data will be a bit flaky at first but its already being produced for Sky+ (which is now very good) so I'm sure it'll be top notch before too long.

Also if they can't get the meta data right... I don't watch the show!

[ReddogOne]

I like cryptic problems though so I'm tempted to put together a 'harvester' for this to see if I can pull enough data to cross-reference and get some more ideas. I still think it's probably all proprietary and the data is only published to the 'paying' developers.

If you want any help with this please let me know. Feel Guilty asking some something and not helping!

[ReddogOne]

As Brain said, season recordings works fine only sometimes the EPG data fails to carry the episode number but you can still see the recording sequence from the dates.

From what has been discussed elsewhere I doubt that the episode and season number as anything to do with whether the episode is recorded or not. I guess that a unique number is given to a series on events which are recorded when they are seen in the stream. This you still having primeval recorded even though the episode and series are not provided.


EDIT: What bit of kit are you using?

[gEd]

correct, gbpvr season recordings are not affected by whether the episode/season number is added to the show sub-title (by the external xmltvgui application) as gbpvr only looks at the show name not the subtitle.

kit: if you mean tuner, a nova-t 500 dual dvb tuner. If you mean screenshot, the skin is hairy's modified reflect theme.