Rule-based TvScheduler service

[dero]

It must just fit in.

[dvdfreak]

Originally Posted by dero

It must just fit in.

Of course, it must be a seamless marriage

But it's at the request of the MP devs themselves that this is kept separate for starters. So this "merger" can and will follow later on if all things work out and the MP devs are happy with what's being offered

[tomtom21000]

dvd-freak: I like the idea very much.

As your concept is a scheduler service, I think this could be used to create an EPG with all the shows of your interest.
Personally, I don´t like to record everything that might be of interest, but I would like to see (and not miss) the information about interesting shows.

1,5 years ago I proposed a personal EPG idea and developped it further with Bavarian and ideas from the forum:
The link below is not the alpha version, but the thread where the concept was discussed:
[New: Alpha version] A learning personal EPG

There you will find a lot about the conceptional ideas. I think you know the alpha version, which was able to define some rules (similar to yours).

In addition you could score the importance with a 5 star system.
The final idea was to make a database about all the shows you viewed (for longer than 10 minutes or so), recorded or manually added as favourites in order to create a personal epg based on your viewing habits.

Bavarian often stated, that he is still working on it from time to time, but he is doing a lot of other things for MP too, so I am not sure what the status is.

Maybe there are some ideas in the concept that are of use for you. Well, considering your service for an epg with interesting shows was the main point i wanted to make.

Maybe the recordings and not recorded but shows of interest could be close together by adding an option to the rules automatic record yes/no.

[THDBASED]

Originally Posted by tomtom21000

dvd-freak: I like the idea very much.

As your concept is a scheduler service, I think this could be used to create an EPG with all the shows of your interest.
Personally, I don´t like to record everything that might be of interest, but I would like to see (and not miss) the information about interesting shows.

1,5 years ago I proposed a personal EPG idea and developped it further with Bavarian and ideas from the forum:
The link below is not the alpha version, but the thread where the concept was discussed:
[New: Alpha version] A learning personal EPG

There you will find a lot about the conceptional ideas. I think you know the alpha version, which was able to define some rules (similar to yours).

In addition you could score the importance with a 5 star system.
The final idea was to make a database about all the shows you viewed (for longer than 10 minutes or so), recorded or manually added as favourites in order to create a personal epg based on your viewing habits.

Bavarian often stated, that he is still working on it from time to time, but he is doing a lot of other things for MP too, so I am not sure what the status is.

Maybe there are some ideas in the concept that are of use for you. Well, considering your service for an epg with interesting shows was the main point i wanted to make.

Maybe the recordings and not recorded but shows of interest could be close together by adding an option to the rules automatic record yes/no.

Well in my concept idea for the new myTV I included a part wich would bring in a personal TV guide wich can propose suggestions for you to watch or to record...I included a picture.

[dvdfreak]

Originally Posted by tomtom21000

Maybe the recordings and not recorded but shows of interest could be close together by adding an option to the rules automatic record yes/no.

Yes, a very good idea! Definately worth thinking about how we can provide both. The same rule engine could be used for both actual schedules or, how shall we call them, notifications, or suggestions.

Schedules currently have a priority: very low, low, normal, high and very high. I could either add a priority like "notify only", or I could add a flag to the schedule to mark it as either a real schedule or as a notification.

I think the second option is better, then we could keep these two types of schedules behind a separate API. So you would have an AddSchedule() and an AddSuggestion() method, a GetUpcomingRecordings() and a GetUpcomingSuggestions(), etc...

[mzemina]

Originally Posted by tomtom21000

...
In addition you could score the importance with a 5 star system.
The final idea was to make a database about all the shows you viewed (for longer than 10 minutes or so), recorded or manually added as favourites in order to create a personal epg based on your viewing habits...

Instead of a 5 star rating, why not just a simple thumbs-up / thumbs-down (or not to be like Tivo, just use the up arrow down arrow when the user is presented with the question if they like this).

[tomtom21000]

Mike,

I just mentioned it to point to a possibility to priorise the shows. Obviously dvdfreak had something similar already planned as he mentions a 5 step priority system as well. The stars were chosen, because that was in line with the usage of stars in other parts of mp like music. But I think, in the end it is up to the skinner, if he wants to display stars or thumbs or whatever.
If you suggest only a binary choice, that is too rough in my opinion.
And, if this plugin is only designed to take care of shows you like (in different degree), a thumbs down wouldn´t be the right symbol I should think.

tomtom

[dvdfreak]

I'd just like to add that I think the auto-suggestions feature sounds great. But I want to get things working correctly with the core functionality first, so "real" schedules and the previously suggested manual suggestions ("non-recording" schedules in a way).

[vuego]

I definitely think we should use the episode-num information available in most EPG sources. If the user for example wants to record every show based on Title, only one recording per episode should be made.

This is how SageTV handles it:

1. Normally the first airing would be recorded. If the show is still in the recorded folder OR watched and then deleted - any rerun would not be recorded.

2. If one episode was successfully recorded but removed before you watched it - the next rerun would be recorded. Then falling back on rule 1 for later reruns.

3. If the tv-card was busy when the episode first aired, or conflicting with another recording, it would automatically schedule the rerun for recording.

Only if there's no reruns for two simultaneously aired programs, a conflict will be made and requiring user attention to solve or only one show would be recorded.

[dvdfreak]

Originally Posted by vuego

I definitely think we should use the episode-num information available in most EPG sources. If the user for example wants to record every show based on Title, only one recording per episode should be made.

This is how SageTV handles it:

1. Normally the first airing would be recorded. If the show is still in the recorded folder OR watched and then deleted - any rerun would not be recorded.

What I have at the moment is that the scheduler will remember any episode title it records for a scheduled program. There will then be a rule to not re-record anything with the same episode title twice.

Originally Posted by vuego

2. If one episode was successfully recorded but removed before you watched it - the next rerun would be recorded. Then falling back on rule 1 for later reruns.

This is not built in at the moment, and in a way, this can never be done by the scheduler on its own, since it doesn't know if something has been watched. But I could provide a method to remove an episode from the recorded list, so point 2 is also easy to implement.

Originally Posted by vuego

3. If the tv-card was busy when the episode first aired, or conflicting with another recording, it would automatically schedule the rerun for recording.

Only if there's no reruns for two simultaneously aired programs, a conflict will be made and requiring user attention to solve or only one show would be recorded.

This one is trickier, since the scheduling subsystem doesn't know anything about conflicts. The design is to get a good rule-based scheduling engine, actually recording anything is one level higher up. Perhaps this is something that will need to be revisited later on, but then the scheduling service would have to know about what cards can record what, etc... And currently this is out of scope.

However, with the appropriate methods on the scheduler API we could provide this I think. Somehing like a GetAllEpisodeReruns() method to provide the recording/conflicts engine with all possible reruns so it can decide what to do.

Thanks for the valuable input!