Feature Request: Send email of upcoming schedule

[jlabrue]

Here is a feature request that I think would be very beneficial. Wouldn't it be nice if Sage could send an email notifying you of the Upcoming Recording schedule everyday. The information is there and accessible. We just need something either built into Sage or one of the great STVI gurus to write a utility that would use some type of SMTP utility (blat) to send a simple text file or HTML file with the next however many days recordings.

So at say 3:00am everynight it would extract the next three days worth of Upcoming Recording and plop it into an email and send it to you. This could all be configured in the GUI.

The reason for this "idea" was because several shows keep showing up as Reruns in Sage when they are in fact New shows (Stargate Atlantis in US). Therefore, Sage is not scheduled to record them. If you could get this simple report daily you could see missing data in your schedule and correct it.

Thoughts?

[blade]

Stargate Atlantis has been marked correctly as first runs for me.

Just curious though, why would you need it emailed to you? Why not just view the recording schedule on the client or use the webserver to view and correct any errors if you need to do it remotely?

[jlabrue]

Basically just laziness. I don't make a concerted effort to check the recording schedule on a daily basis. I set up favorites and just make the assumption that they will be recorded as I have anticipated. I am not always able to check the schedule regularly or access the website daily but I always have access to email of some sort. Checking it daily, especially if I'm not at home or out of town, can get to be a pain but browsing an email and deleting it takes very little effort or time. Same issue with the web. I've talked to several Sage users who would like to see the same so I thought I would throw it out there to gauge interest.

Stargate Atlantis showed Rerun on mine and a couple other peoples and the one for next Friday 1/20 is again showing as a rerun so I set a manual recording after this Fridays incident. Thankfully SciFi showed it again later that night so I got it but that wouldn't be the case for most series (this has happened before for an episode of the last Survivor). The season finale was marked as a rerun. I didn't check my recordings since Sage is VERY dependable unless the guide data is incorrect. Had I gotten my daily emails I would have know a few days ahead of time and went in and checked.

We use blat where I work to send emails with log informatio, etc... and some type of routine that utilized that or some other daemon to send the email would be a very useful function. Not everyone would need/use it but I would bet that a lot of people would This could be another feature that sets Sage apart from the other PVR apps.

[jlabrue]

Update: Looked at exporting the schedule to a task file using the scheduler_export_file property to dump it too a file. Unfortunately it dumps all kinds of stuff that I have no use for instead of just what should be scheduled. It looks like it is dumping everything that Intelligent Recording would catch if it were enabled. Could anyone verify that this is the case or is there a way to have it export only what i have scheduled to record? I could make my own solution with blat if I could trim that list down.

[Opus4]

The first line of that file shows the format of each line. If a line has false for both ManualRecord & Favorite, then it is IR, so that's how you can determine things while parsing it.

- Andy

[jlabrue]

I saw the "true" option on the favorites. I'm not much of a developer or scripter so it is beyond me to get the useful data out of that file. I was just hoping that since I did not have IR set it would only dump my scheduled recordings which in this case are favorites. If someone ever gets a chance and knows how to do something that could be emailed I think others would find it useful. I think some guy on the Meedio side wrote a generic plugin for Meedio that allows anyone to write a plugin to access that code for email similar to the getstatus plugin for Sage. I know this stuff would probably be simple for the guys with talent but finding time to do something like this is probably hard to come by.

[rsagetv99]

I could probably write a small script in Kixtart to parse the file for you and output a new file with the information you need. If you are interested post a copy of the file and I will see what I can do. BTW kixtart is a free command processor used mostly for processing login scripts on a network. I can send you the links to download the software. Sorry, but being a Sys Admin, this is the language that I am most comfortable scripting in, but I know it can do what you are asking, I do similar tasks all of the time.

[jlabrue]

Cool, here it is. I know the utilities your talking about and how to use them. I just don't know how to parse the file.

Thanks for helping. Maybe we can create a proof of concept for someone to write an STVI to perform the task. I know of 4 or 5 people personally that would love to be able to do this and I'm sure there are others.

SageSchedule.txt

[rsagetv99]

Ok, here is the script. It will read the SageSchedule.txt file from your C: drive and output a SageRecordingSchedule.csv back to your C: drive.

In the new file it lists only shows that were recorded by a favorite or manual recording (no IR). It also only lists the Start Time, Stop Time, Channel Number, Channel Name, and Title of the show - but this can be changed to whatever you want.

You will need to download the kixtart commad processor, and execute the script by going to Start - Run and then something like.
c:\kixtart\kix32 c:\SageRecordingsParser.txt

Sorry if I am getting too basic, but in my job I am used to dealing with people with minimal computer skills.

Let me know if you need more help. Also, I would like to try it out when you get it finished.

[jlabrue]

Thanks rsagetv99! I'll give it a shot this weekend hopefully. I'm not going to be able to do much with it since I'm not much of a coder but I will get it setup to send in an email somehow with blat. I've got a friend who is going to see if he can get the file parsed and emailed using Java. If he can that would be a great way to get this into a STVI somehow.

[jlabrue]

rsagetv99,

I tried the kix script but it is not outputting anything in the .csv file it creates. It's there just empty. I got kixtart from kixtart.org their latest version. On the command line after executing the command it returns a code of "00" where I would expext it to be 01 or something like that.

Tested using Blat for sending the full file and it works fine as long as your virus software isn't blocking port 25

Any ideas?

[jlabrue]

Bump, just in case rsagetv99 missed the last post

[rsagetv99]

Originally Posted by jlabrue

rsagetv99,

I tried the kix script but it is not outputting anything in the .csv file it creates. It's there just empty. I got kixtart from kixtart.org their latest version. On the command line after executing the command it returns a code of "00" where I would expext it to be 01 or something like that.

Tested using Blat for sending the full file and it works fine as long as your virus software isn't blocking port 25

Any ideas?

Sorry, I was off the board for a couple days. Make sure the exported file from SAGE has the right file name and that it is in your C drive. It should be C:\SageSchedule.txt. We can change it to a different name if needed later on, but for testing just rename it if it isn't already SageSchedule.txt.

[rsagetv99]

Bump, just in case jlabrue missed the last post

[jlabrue]

rsagetv99,

Hey sorry I was gone for a little as well and missed both posts. I have set it up the way you describe. I will try again to verify I have it exactly the same. It ran and would create the output file it just never had any data. I will give it another go and verify that I have everything exactly the way it needs to be.

John