Collecting Shows - Got to get them all

[theason]

Has anybody already developed something that would enable me to track episodes from a series that I've already recorded? In particular, for something like children's cartoons. Same title every time, but buried in the description is enough detail to hopefully tell which ones I already have. For example, say I wanted to record all the episodes of a cartoon on various channels for the next year that I do not already have. Hopefully the network loops through all of the episodes and eventually I can collect them all. I also have a very finite amount of disk space for NPVR, so keeping all of the recordings on disk for the next year while they play through the list a few times isn't realistic.

I'll remove the commercials and move them off to my NAS every few days, and serve them up for my two year old to watch from the IPad over and over and over; minus all the commercials

So things like the "new" indicator in the listings are not helpful to me, nor can I keep a hundred episodes of each cartoon locally for NPVR to review against.

[mvallevand]

I've written a couple of custom c# programs that are for collecting for my needs, but unless the unique ID is really good you probably aren't going to be very successful. If you upload your db and give me an example show name, I'll see what you might be able to do.

Martin

[theason]

Thanks for the reply. Sorry for the delay in my response.

Well, I'm not sure what exactly you might be looking for in the unique_id. They look pretty unique to me, but maybe you were thinking of another use like parsing it for information. I've got no problem writing a bit of c# to make what I might need, but you clearly have a better understanding of the mechanics of what I'd need to do to query, and schedule.

Here's my database. Let's take a show like Phineas and Ferb... looks to be plenty of data to keep a list...

Code:

SELECT EPG_EVENT.oid,  EPG_EVENT.title, EPG_EVENT.subtitle, channel.name, EPG_EVENT.unique_id
FROM EPG_EVENT
INNER JOIN channel
ON channel.oid = EPG_EVENT.channel_oid
WHERE title = 'Phineas and Ferb'
AND subtitle <> '';

Code:

oid    title            subtitle                    channel.name    unique_id
3136476    Phineas and Ferb    Out to Launch                    720 DISNHD    EP00948847.0049
3136526    Phineas and Ferb    Got Game?; Comet Kermilian            720 DISNHD    EP00948847.0042
3136545    Phineas and Ferb    Fly on the Wall; My Sweet Ride            720 DISNHD    EP00948847.0360
3136575    Phineas and Ferb    Out of Toon; Hail Doofania!            720 DISNHD    EP00948847.0047
3136591    Phineas and Ferb    Love at First Byte                720 DISNHD    EP00948847.0387
3136860    Phineas and Ferb    Let's Take a Quiz; At the Car Wash        720 DISNHD     EP00948847.0076
3136878    Phineas and Ferb    The Belly of the Beast; Moon Farm        720 DISNHD     EP00948847.0203
3136888    Phineas and Ferb    Where's Perry?                    720 DISNHD    EP00948847.0328.0/2
3136889    Phineas and Ferb    Where's Perry? Part II                720 DISNHD    EP00948847.0332.1/2

[mvallevand]

Ok your database is good to show what I mean try

select * from epg_event where genres like '%kid%' sort by title

The shows that have a unique id beginning with EP won't get re-recorded but the ones with SH will because there is nothing unique about them. So you will end up wiht all those Phineas and Ferb SH* file recorded everytime plus the unique ones.

Martin