Feature Request - cate favs / ep# favs / no show info toggle

[bluenote]

If there is a particular place for feature requests, I didn't find it with a cursory search.

First let me say that I really love the favorite functionality as it is now, and I love the new changes in V3 also.

Having said that I would love a couple tweaks:

0) Separate favorite screens because scrolling through 70 favorites is a real pain. I was thinking it would be enough to categorize them based on title, keyword, or actor favorites, but that might not work for everyone. Maybe just make that the default but allow favorites to be moved / the labels to be changed. I'm not sure how priority is then dealt with but I could be convinced to sit down and figure out some low-programming overhead fixes.

0.5) A "Don't Like" that is more global and applies to more than IR recording.. like a 'never record' flag for movies (that keep coming up on my favorites, or for series that I hate and come up in keywords for various reasons) I know this one is partially solved by 'Watched' but ... hey its a request.

1) Control favorites based on episode # (1 - 10, > 5 <25 or '1-5,12-13,>50')

2) A toggle to exclude/include shows that have no description information. This happens (for example) on some episodes of certain shows that are on a lot, and/or it happens on certain channels.

2b) Being able to select multiple channels / multiple days / multiple everything in favorites would be really cool.

3) (the granddaddy) I would really love to see a regular expression evaluator in favorites for when a show is on a lot, or Im really picky about what shows I want to record. with a few reserved words, I think this could be really powerful, satisfy everyone's urge to be anal retentive, and not clutter up the rest of the features with a lot of special case stuff.
Now at work I hate when non programmers talk about implementation, but at one time in my life I did an implementation very similar to this, and basically it was just a n+1 line text field, that was evaluated line by line, for either true/false and/or took a few actions/set a few fields. An example might be:

( (do not) record favorite when
TIME > 19:55
TIME < 23:59
CHANNEL = 45,47
ACTOR (contains) Paulie Shore
DAY=MON
EP#=0 (no show info)
(for good measure)
ACTOR (contains) 'Tasha Yar' PRIORITY++

I'm sure this could be codified a bit better and cleaned up for ease of coding, and I'd be happy to do so if necessary. The first thing that comes to mind is a 4 field selector "TIME/CH#/DESC/DETAIL/EP#/DAY" "(evaluator list) "VALUE" "ACTION"
Maybe the above is unrealistic .. am I the only one who really wants absolute control over what gets recorded on an automatic set-it-and-forget-it basis?

(Opus, if you're reading, feel free to move this post somewhere else and/or let's establish a proper place for feature requests?)

Cory

[blade]

1) Control favorites based on episode # (1 - 10, > 5 <25 or '1-5,12-13,>50')

I would love to see Sage sort by episode # or original air date. Some shows just need to be watched in order and it's a pain to try and look through them manually to figure out the order they originally aired.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by cnovak

(Opus, if you're reading, feel free to move this post somewhere else and/or let's establish a proper place for feature requests?)

While there is nothing wrong with discussing such things in the forum & that might help refine an idea, the 'proper' place to make a feature request where SageTV will see it is to submit it directly to them. The forum is not really monitored for tracking such things.

Originally Posted by blade

I would love to see Sage sort by episode # or original air date.

By coincidence, that was added as a sort option for SageTV Recordings just the other day.

- Andy

[blade]

Nice.

[Enormous]

Originally Posted by cnovak

Separate favorite screens because scrolling through 70 favorites is a real pain. I was thinking it would be enough to categorize them based on title, keyword, or actor favorites, but that might not work for everyone. Maybe just make that the default but allow favorites to be moved / the labels to be changed.

This sparked within me an idea. How about labels for a favorite (similar to the way that GMail uses labels for mail). That way I could have my favorites, and other people could have theirs. When I wanted to manage them, I could go in and choose to do just that, instead of (like cnovak) scrolling through 70+ favorites. Although I can see problems with prioritization, unless the labels were used only for organization, and the global favorites management was not affected.

BTW, Andy: If we wanted to submit such an idea for a feature directly to SageTV, what is the best way of doing so? Thanks.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by Enormous

BTW, Andy: If we wanted to submit such an idea for a feature directly to SageTV, what is the best way of doing so? Thanks.

Before I got more directly involved, I used to submit suggestions via the bug report form. When it wasn't a beta, I used one of the contact email addresses. Hmmm... I suppose I should double check how they prefer such things be sent.

- Andy

[michelkenny]

Originally Posted by Enormous

This sparked within me an idea. How about labels for a favorite (similar to the way that GMail uses labels for mail). That way I could have my favorites, and other people could have theirs. When I wanted to manage them, I could go in and choose to do just that, instead of (like cnovak) scrolling through 70+ favorites. Although I can see problems with prioritization, unless the labels were used only for organization, and the global favorites management was not affected.

BTW, Andy: If we wanted to submit such an idea for a feature directly to SageTV, what is the best way of doing so? Thanks.

Labels would indeed be nice to seperate multiple users' favorites. Once thing that I would like to see (in v4 or something) is multi user support, where each user would have their own "profile". I have 4 users (myself included) using a couple of different Sage clients, all connected to the same server. It gets complicated to sort through every recording since everyone has their own shows that they want to watch. Sometimes only one user wants to watch a show, sometimes a couple of users all want to watch a show before it being deleted. If Sage could somehow handle this with user profiles I would be a very happy man (and my family would be very happy too!).

[bluenote]

to the above person,

Maybe malore's STV (and/or the secret additions) will do what you want with his custom menus and his auto switch between them with the custom4 and custom5 commands.

Cory

Opus: are you saying I should email this to support@sagetv.com ?
thx

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by cnovak

Opus: are you saying I should email this to support@sagetv.com ?

I guess. I was answering your question about the proper place for feature requests... by saying that such requests should be sent directly to SageTV one way or another if you want to make sure they get seen. (I don't compile lists of such requests.)

Again: I used to send them via the bug report form back in the v2 beta, so I would imagine that would still work just fine.

- Andy