"Rating" in cached event details xml

[imilne]

Lots of good points there.

Perhaps we should start by listing the use cases, then think about the design?

Personally, I would like genre support so that programmes can be colour-coded in the TV Guide. Anything beyond that would be a bonus, but the obvious one is the ability to search for stuff by genre, eg, "find all upcoming movies".

Iain

[mvallevand]

So your number one use-case is of course the most complicated. Colour-coding would need sub to commit to this, and for this a colour value will need to be in the database, plus it will need to be populated by the user tool.

Assuming we kept the GENRE table as our base, we'd also need a tool to assign the colours before they go to the database.

SearchLite already searches movies but not on genre, on their star-rating.

Martin

[imilne]

I'm not convinced it is, and zehd's suggestion of two columns in the EPG_EVENT table would sort it:

Code:

OID, Title, Description, etc, etc, [B][color=red]Genre, Genre_RGB[/color][/B]

It would be pretty easy for a tool to populate that, and (I'd hope) very easy for the TV Guide to look at the entry and colour it accordingly.

I'm not entirely clear on your suggestions regarding a separate Genre table though, so feel free to point out how the above clashes with that. If the above had entries such as...

Code:

1, Some Title, Some Description, etc, etc, "Movie, Drama", #FF0000
2, Another TItle, Another Description, etc, etc, "Movie, Drama", #FF0000

...then are you saying that the problem for you is that you'd have to scan every entry before you could be sure that you needed to offer a list to the user that contained just "Movie, Drama"? (ie, it might be entry 200,000 before you finally came across "News").

Iain

[mvallevand]

Now I get it, you and zehd are basically talking display which sub may or may not support on the NPVR UI and I have always been talking searching without involving sub.

I had not fully thought out the full text from the genre presentation field. If I was to search a genre I guess I'd have to test how efficient the "LIKE %criteria%" searches will be.

But yes my main concern is populating a dynamic pick list of only the available genres and not presenting possible genres most of which will be blank on my db.

Martin

[imilne]

But yes my main concern is populating a dynamic pick list of only the available genres and not presenting possible genres most of which will be blank on my db.

The populate-tool could maintain a separate list of all unique entries as it fills in the table, but then it would have to be stored somewhere too.

As you say though, it's all going to depend on sub anyway, and to be honest, I'd rather he didn't answer yet (and destroy my hopes) until we can thrash out likely scenarios and present him with something we'd all be happy with

[mvallevand]

To do the colour thing you will need another table too, I don't think it can be avoided.

Since we are still theory, because of sub's comment that most XMLTV don't have genre info what I was thinking of doing with SearchLite was import the IMDB genre ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/misc/movies/d...es.list.gz and create a table that users would have to update manually from time to time. Now that I know the attach works I might see what I can do using GBPVR schemas.

Martin

[imilne]

To do the colour thing you will need another table too, I don't think it can be avoided.

To store the user's preferences for what colour to assign to each genre? That wouldn't necessarily have to go into the DB though, it could just be kept externally by the plugins/tools.

Iain

[zehd]

To store the user's preferences for what colour to assign to each genre? That wouldn't necessarily have to go into the DB though, it could just be kept externally by the plugins/tools.

Iain

Fascinating... I was just thinking that Martin was more interested in Searching capabilities, and imiline and I were talking about display... and you sorted it while I was out... LOL

Ultra previously captured a list of all genres while it sorted the xmltv file... it then referenced a table that said

eg
Action and Adventure=red
Action/Adventure=red
Adventure=red
Animated=blue
Arts=grey
Awards/Event=hot pink
Biography=boring
Children=blue

What Ultra did for config purposes was to have have logical groupings.. and so if you said all adventure type things was deep red, it would change the argb value in the table for the handful of adventure types...

Anyway... during processing time, Ultra would see a genre and add an xml tag for the argb.

nPVR would import the xmltv, and the argb values would be in the epg_event table

TV Guide would display.. and each cell would show, title, subtitle, start, end and argb value for back ground colour..
---

True... for searching... it would be a line by line, searching for something within a string of possibly many genres... and that would be slow-ish... but it would not impact the TV Guide in display... the possible lag would only be noticed while doing a search...

[zehd]

I agree that we should have a community standardized genre list, group and colour database that each of our apps can implement...

Not to say that a user would be required to adhere to our colour scheme at all... rather a default base of data

[sub]

You cant have a standard list of genre. It varies from country to country, and by EPG source. All you can do is have a table with the list of genre that have been seen to-date.