[Request] Genre-based TV Guide (1 Viewer)

bodiroga

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January 1, 2008
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Hi guys!

Yesterday, while I was watching TV, I realized that the channel-based TV Guides weren't as useful as they should because normally people want to see a particular type of program (movies, tvserie, news,...) and they don't care in which channel are being aired (at least that's my case :D). My previous (paid) TV provider offers that option and I considered it a great and useful option, sooo... why don't we try to build a plugin that brings up that option to our loved program?

Here is how the plugin should work in my opinion:

- "What's now" screen: the plugin should show a screen with the future programs ordered by time and categorized by genres. For example, let's suppose that it's 8pm and that we have the following programs in different channels:

Channel 1:

Movie from 7:30pm to 9pm
News from: 9pm to 9:45pm
TVSerie: 10pm to 11pm
TVSerie: 11pm to 12pm

Channel 2:

Sports from 7pm to 8:30pm
News from 8:30pm to 9pm
Movie from 9pm to 10:30pm
TVSerie: 10:30pm to 11:pm

Channel 3:

Documentary from 8:15pm to 9pm
Reality Show from 9pm to 10pm
Sports from 10pm to 12pm
TVSerie from 12pm to 1am

Channel 4:

Really Show from 7:30pm to 8:30pm
News from 8:30pm to 9:30pm
Movie from 9:30pm to 11pm
TVSerie from 11pm to 12pm

...

If we configure the plugin to show the categories Movies, Series and News we should get:

Movies:

"Movie title" at channel1 (started 30 minutes ago)
at channel2 (in 1 hour)
at channel4 (in 1.5 hour)

Series:

at channel1 (in 2 hours)
at channel2 (in 2.5 hours)
at channel1 (in 3 hours)
at channel4 (in 3 hours)
at channel3 (in 4 hours)

News:

at channel2 (in 30 minutes)
at channel3 (in 30 minutes)
at channel1 (in 1 hour)

I hope that you can get the idea ;-) Obviously the guide will be more filled if we add more channels.

- "Tonight" screen: same as the previous screen but only showing Movies, Series, News, Documentaries,... from 8pm to 11pm (it can be configurable) and instead of showing "in x minutes" just show the program start time. This can be useful to have a look at tonight's movies while you are watching news at the evening and see if you want to record one or set a reminder.

For now these are the only screens that I've thought about.

The following options should be configurable in the plugin:

- Categories: the user should be able to create categories simply picking up the genres they want from MediaPortal's TV database. Therefore, it's really important to have a complete EPG.
- "Started x minutes ago": this minutes should be configurable by the user to not show lots of programs that have being started (in my personal case I won't see any movie that has already started). Can be also configurable for each category.
- The user should be able to set a recording or a reminder when clicking in a program that hasn't started. MediaPortal classes can be used for this.


What do you think about the idea? Do you consider it interesting? Will you use a plugin like this? Any dev interesting in bringing life to this? :D

I don't know how much difficult is to develop this plugin, but all the information is already availabe in the mptvdb database. It's just a matter of building the correct SQL queries for each categorie and show the results sorted by time, isn't it? (Please, don't misunderstand it, it's not my intention to underestimate the work that it requires).

That's all for now, I hope that people will like the idea and will share their opinions.

Thanks for reading the post and best regards,

Aitor
 

jameson_uk

Retired Team Member
  • Premium Supporter
  • January 27, 2005
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    Just to say you can achieve similar using the EPG search functionality in that you can get listings by genre
     

    bodiroga

    Portal Pro
    January 1, 2008
    241
    46
    Home Country
    Spain Spain
    • Thread starter
    • Moderator
    • #3
    Just to say you can achieve similar using the EPG search functionality in that you can get listings by genre

    Hi Jameson! Many thanks for answering to my post, I was wrong when I thought that this idea could be interesting for more people :(

    And yes, you are right, something similar can be achieve using EPG search functionality and listing by genre (that was one of the reasons why I thought that the plugin should not be so difficult to develop, lots of code can be borrowed), but for me the main difference is that the search results are not displayed in a useful way. That's way I thought that sorting the results by genre (without making a category for each result) and ordering them by time will be really helpful to see "what movies/series/sports/documentaries/news/reallity show/... can I watch now on tv"?

    But hey, if no one considers it interesting I should start learning something about C#, SQL queries and so on, this is open source after all ;)

    Thanks for reading my suggestion and best regards,

    Aitor
     

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