[ViX_Misc] Autotimers and Description Uniqueness

[Old Codger]

Hi all.

When I started this topic, little did I think that it would cause a 'punch-up'. As Abu Baniaz says, please calm down and be polite to each other.

Anyway, I'm most grateful that Brian has gone to so much effort.

I've tested his version of Autotimer, over a number of different programmes on both the 'Forces TV' channel and several others, including some of the main ones (BBC etc) and a few of the lesser ones.

So far, I've found only one case where things don't work properly (there will be others of course): Dr Who on the 'Drama' channel next Sat/Sun -
This one is a little unusual in having several episodes with 'New. ' at the start of the description, not in the title, so Brian's version of course creates timers for all episodes including duplicates (which don't have the 'New. '), while the standard version of Autotimer works as intended.

Without wishing to stir up any more aggravation, may I suggest the following improvements (?) to the new version -
1. Instead of replacing spaces, punctuation etc with underlines, drop them completely. This would help where, for example, a comma has been left out of one descriptions, or "its" has been changed to "it's" , and so forth.
2. (controversial!) Have an extra option in the 'Edit Autotimer' page, to allow the new code to be toggled on/off. I guess that this could require changes to another python module, and assumes a means for 2 module to communicate with each other, but would have the advantage of making it easier to disable the new features without having to revert back to the standard version. Too much work to implement this suggestion, perhaps?

Finally, a question.
Will any change to the matching algorithm affect the result of comparing an episode's description with the lists of recordings and completed timers?

 

[BrokenUnusableAccount]

An slightly improved version that handles "New." at the start of descriptions and ignores ascii apostrophes has been made available

https://www.brian-gregory.me.uk/GDL/AutoTimer.py

 

[Old Codger]

An slightly improved version that handles "New." at the start of descriptions and ignores ascii apostrophes has been made available AutoTimer.py

Many thanks for that.

The first change works as expected - it sets up timers for just the first 3 episodes of the programme mentioned in post #141, instead of all 6 as before. Can't test the 2nd change until such an example actually occurs, of course.

 

[Willo3092]

An slightly improved version that handles "New." at the start of descriptions and ignores ascii apostrophes has been made available

https://www.brian-gregory.me.uk/GDL/AutoTimer.py

This is the best version that I've tried. Only picked up one duplicate and that had a different short description.

 

[ccs]

Not particularly relevent, but epg search of Us, BBC1 21:00 today, must produce a world record number of hits.

 

[birdman]

Not particularly relevent, but epg search of Us, BBC1 21:00 today, must produce a world record number of hits.

But presumably setting a service of BBC ONE, a day of Sunday and a time range of 20:30 to 21:30 reduced the number considerably. Which is what Autotimers let you do for such cases.

 

[ccs]

But presumably setting a service of BBC ONE, a day of Sunday and a time range of 20:30 to 21:30 reduced the number considerably. Which is what Autotimers let you do for such cases.

Yes, I know, my autotimer picked up a single programme when I set it up earlier in the week, but an epg search just gives you everything with "Us" in it - hundreds.
Most of the time epg search gives you what you want, this one was an exception I'd not noticed before.

I tried it out last night, an autotimer with partial match, any time, any day, any service (I think some people do this), the box coped ok with hundreds of timers and 12 recordings starting up.
Undoing it took a while.

 

[BrokenUnusableAccount]

An slightly improved version that handles "New." at the start of descriptions and ignores ascii apostrophes has been made available

Don't know if anyone but me is still using this, (BTW it works fine on v5.4) but since that post I've added a few more ways I've seen new series identified in to it and hopefully made it slightly better at seeing Sky and Freeview descriptions as the same in some cases where the text used is basically the same etc. It's all relatively minor improvements though.

https://www.brian-gregory.me.uk/GDL/AutoTimer.py

 

[BrokenUnusableAccount]

Don't know if anyone but me is still using this, (BTW it works fine on v5.4) but since that post I've added a few more ways I've seen new series identified in to it and hopefully made it slightly better at seeing Sky and Freeview descriptions as the same in some cases where the text used is basically the same etc. It's all relatively minor improvements though.

Small changes from 5.4.006 now included. I'm still using it.

https://www.brian-gregory.me.uk/GDL/AutoTimer.py