Tvheadend

How are you getting your EPG?

For me, using SchedulesDirect xmltv or OTA info, the "alternative showings" for films shows alternative showings.

I'm testing some changes so that in the "related broadcasts", if the programmes are not linked (no series link info such as some news broadcasts on xmltv) then it will do an "api epg query" for programmes matching the title.

Em Smith wrote:

How are you getting your EPG?

"EIT: EPG Grabber" and "Internal: xmltv grabbers"

I'm testing some changes so that in the "related broadcasts", if the programmes are not linked (no series link info such as some news broadcasts on xmltv) then it will do an "api epg query" for programmes matching the title.

My epg doesn't use series link info.

The "Show duplicates" button worked based on the DVR configuration "Duplicate handling" (in my case I use "Local: Record if different title").
This change has broken the ability to see/hide the alternative duplicate recordings (and the column "Rerun of").

I would think that "Show duplicates" and "Alternative showings" are two different things, where:

"Show duplicates" would show what tvh considers duplicates according to your "Duplicate handling" setting.
and
"Alternative showings" would show either what the EPG/xmltv data is reporting, or missing that info, would be a match between "title"/"episode" or "subtitle"/"description".

Maybe there could be a global or per network EPG setting for what criteria would be used for "Alternative showings"?

Having both would make it much easier for users to see if their "Duplicate handling" setting is doing what they expect.

It would also make it much easier for users to resolve recording conflicts. For example I have a single tuner which has a group of about ten channels which show a lot of the same programs at usually different times. Sometimes program-a is only show once on channel-a, but a program-b is already set to record on channel-b at that time. However, program-b will be shown multiple times and could be recorded at a non-conflicting time. Then add programs c-e and channels c-e and things get complicated. Using priorities can help in some cases, but usually you have no idea which autorec will be program-a in this scenario - ie, next week program-b will only be show once and program-a will be shown multiple times. It would be great if tvh could automatically resolve these conflicts, but I understand it is a quite complicated task to automate. Maybe a start would be an auto-priority system where a program with a single showing is given higher priority than a program with multiple showings?

Completely agree with Joe User.
The "Show duplicates" button should be placed back on the webui.

I did test https://github.com/tvheadend/tvheadend/pull/1236 and I can see the duplicate entries clicking "Related broadcasts" dialog window.
But I believe this is not the perfect solution since it's not really showing the "Duplicate handling" resulting items since it is hardcoded to just display shows with the same title.

The key problem with the old duplicate is that it's not usable in many environments. For example, I have up to 120 episodes of "The Simpsons" per day in my schedule due to numerous channels, with typical of 60 per day. If duplicates are shown then the dvr is basically unusable. That is just for one show. If you add in duplicates for other shows then for the 20 programmes I actually have scheduled, it would typically have several thousand entries of potential duplicates and you could not see the wood for the trees.

It is not easy to re-add the functionality to the UI since it was removed in the server to ensure we correctly handled scenarios such as where autorecs could record programmes that the rule no longer matched, or didn't record ones they should match due to interactions between autorecs; and to add functionality to ensure we don't record partial programmes or record in SD when the user wanted HD. That needed the list of upcoming timers to be accurate and not contain duplicates, and had the benefit of slightly reducing memory usage.

The PR fixes up the dialogs to handle incomplete xmltv/OTA data, so your xmltv isn't providing unique ids for programmes, hence the dialogs were empty. For Joe, I guess his country isn't providing OTA with the unique ids.

I think the PR might resolve Joe's issue (the PR was submitted before he wrote the comment). Though, it only matches by title if the epg info is incomplete, not via description. But, if you're recording programme A due to it matching description X then showing other title programmes with title A seems correct to me.

I can see it may be useful to add another dialog of epg entries that match a recording rule. But, I'm not really sure what scenario you have where you're recording a show and the PR which shows other shows with the same title isn't sufficient? Without understanding what is missing, I can't yet understand what that dialog would show that is different to what we are showing in the pull request.

Thanks. Quite busy now, but will certainly test when I get a chance.