Enhanced Search Functionality request

[ceejayemm]

I use NextPVR to record films from the UK FreeView service and to help with this I have used the 'Films on FreeView' website (https://www.viewfilm.net/) to find out what is being shown in the next couple of weeks. Recently however this web site has not being working due to technical issues being experienced by its provider.

Another source of film listings is the plethora of listings magazines published here in the UK, with The Radio Times probably being the best, if most expensive, of these. For a long time The Radio Times had a section showing all the films being broadcast during the week covered by the publication so it was easy to browse through this section to find any films I wanted to record.  Recent changes in the format of The Radio Times have now resulted in the films being listed in each daily section which makes this process a lot more tedious.

I have realised that I have an excellent resource, in the form of the NextPVR EPG, closer to hand which I don't really make the most of. The Guide is populated each day, for me, using the Schedules Direct listings which for the UK are pretty good.  I use the basic search facility and occasionally the more advance search features but I wondered if it might be possible to provide something a bit more useful ? Whilst I have a background in programming and databases (it is somewhat rusty and well out of date) I don't 'know' the NextPVR database in any detailed way to be able to put together the searches I might need or to create the pages to publish the results.

I would initially like to be able to search the EPG and list all the films (movies) showing:

- Channel Name/Icon
- Film name and date
- Broadcast start and end date
- Film description / synopsis
- Age classification (in the UK U, PG, 12, 15 etc. but any classification used by SD would be OK)
- Review rating (one to five stars or again any classification used by SD would be OK)

It would be nice to be able to choose to:

- show all occurrences of films held in the EPG
- or to restrict them to unique names as FreeView tends to endless repeat films within a given period on the same or different channels.

From the presented list of films it should be possible to select and record the film(s) using the existing recording selection options.

A future extension of this might be to apply the same selection capabilities to other categories of TV shows e.g. Children's TV, News, Sport, Political (?), Comedy, Documentary etc. depending on what categories are available from the EPG.

I know somebody, somewhere (Sub / Martin ?) will tell me that all this is possible using SQL statements and I would be happy to use this as a trial/starter to prove the functionality if its easy to implement. However it would be so much better if this functionality could be available within the web app so that it is available across the whole breath of NextPVR implementation. This would also appeal to my wife, who has no programming knowledge, so that she could use a 'nice' listing that would subsequently make it easy to choose which film to record. It would also enhance the already great functionality of NextPVR and might appeal to other users too.

I hope this might get some consideration and appear in a version of NextPVR in the not too distant future :-)

Many thanks 

Chris

[sub]

The closest you can currently get to that is on the Search page of the web app, choosing 'More Options', setting the Genre to 'Movie' and hitting search.

[mvallevand]

@ceejayemm I added this feature with enhanced IMDB information to a v3/4 addon and no one used it, so it probably isn't worth a lot of sub's time.

When the Title is not provided I do like the idea of not grouping by tiltle, it does make genre based movie lists hard to use. I can always search out the movie itself later.

Martin

[ceejayemm]

Thanks both, I thought it was worth a punt if only to see if anybody else reacted.

Martin - v3/4 was before my time with NextPVR but if you still have the database queries used in the plugin you mentioned it might give me food for thought.

Thanks

Chris

[ceejayemm]

Well that was simpler than I thought, even for my rusty sql skills. I copied the /var/opt/nextpvr/npvr.db3 file to my local desktop and ran the following query which seems to give me the basis of what I want:

select
chl.name
    , epg.title
    , epg.start_time
    , epg.end_time
    , epg.rating
    , epg.star_rating
    , epg.description
from EPG_EVENT epg, channel chl
where epg.channel_oid = chl.oid
and epg.genres like '%Movie%'
order by epg.star_rating desc, epg.title, epg.start_time

The 'order by' statement is work in progress to see what the range of broadcast dates for movies.

Is there any way I can send the query from my desktop to be executed on the rpi that actually runs my NextPVR server and holds the 'real' active database ?

Peeked my interest now.

Thanks

Chris

[sub]

You can't easily execute the SQL query against the server on another machine, unless you have a drive mapped that can see the database file.

You can get somewhat similar results by doing an HTTP request though: (ie, try it from a logged in browser first to see the results)
http://server:8866/services/service?meth...enre=Movie

It'll return all the details related to the matching shows though.