Genres

[imilne]

I was hoping to write a small plugin that would let me do fast channel/genre searches in the EPG, eg "show me all movies" or "show me all movies from just channels x, y, and z".

This obviously isn't possible yet because the EPG data in NPVR doesn't hold genre information, unlike GBPVR. Are there plans to include it at some point?

I'd sorely miss it if doesn't make it in, not least for the great ability that GBPVR has to colour-code the EPG by genre.

[sub]

This obviously isn't possible yet because the EPG data in NPVR doesn't hold genre information, unlike GBPVR. Are there plans to include it at some point?

To be honest, I didnt intend to. The majority of users never used it in GBPVR, but all were forced to suffer the performance problems associated with its one-to-many relationship with show listings. It also made a lot of things more complicated than I like (with all sorts of tricks like demand-loading etc to workaround performance issues). On the surface it seemed like a simple extra data field, but the truth was much more painful.

[imilne]

Hmm. How about a non-normalized solution then?

Rather than multiple tables, just store the genre as a text field in with the rest of the EPG_EVENT data. That would give you fast importing I think, and the information would still be searchable (and probably not too slow). You could also match the colour to a programme at import time and store it in with the EPG_EVENT data too. If the user decides to change their colours (a very rare event I'm sure), all they'd need to do is empty the EPG and reimport it to get the new colours used.

I guess this does need one extra table: GENRE_COLOURS or something, but it could just hold strings (and colours) entered by the user, rather than a list of all genres, so it's not linked with the data in any way. If the EPG data contains "MOVIE" but the user entered a colour for "MOVEI", then tough.

As for users not using it, I think the problem was that most were not aware of its existence (I wasn't for a long time too) but I have found it very handy, and it can certainly makes the guide look a bit more colourful, although my own choice of colours are a bit dull (sports in red, movies in blue)