A way to have favorite re-record watched episode?

[ChrisNH]

Hi,

Here is the scenario. We record Sesame Street every day. I would like to keep a rotating window of, say, 5 sesame streets at any given time. I would like to set auto delete on with a limit of 5. If I understand archive, individual episodes can be saved by marking them "archived" and they won't count toward this limit.

If I understand how "watched" works, once we have watched a Sesame Street, that episode will never be recorded again. We would like to bypass that behavior. That is.. we would like to happily record reruns as they occur whether we have watched them already or not.

The current behavior is fantastic for the "adult" shows, no complaints there. We just want to disable the watched status from being considered when a favorite is being recorded for children's shows.

I think we can mark the more obnoxious episodes as "Don't Like"?

Anyway, not sure if there is a way to do this or if I have to manually "unwatch" them every day.

Thanks,

Chris

[GKusnick]

There's no built-in way to ignore Watched status. But instead of unwatching each epsiode individually, you can go to the Favorite Details and unwatch them all in one go, say once a week or once a month.

It would probably be possible to automate this with scripted webserver requests or remote API calls, but I don't know if anyone has done that.

[QueOnda]

Don't know if it's in the default SageTV. But if you load the Nielms webadmin, you can goto your favorites manager, then click on the show and on the left side you'll have "past airings". Click on it and select all or what you like then on the bottle of the screen you'll have a selectable dropdown and select clear watched and click on set.

OR

If you have SageMC installed there is a way to do it (i believe it's under the favorites manager) but I cannot confirm right now.

[lazysean]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

There's no built-in way to ignore Watched status. But instead of unwatching each epsiode individually, you can go to the Favorite Details and unwatch them all in one go, say once a week or once a month.

It would probably be possible to automate this with scripted webserver requests or remote API calls, but I don't know if anyone has done that.

I don't believe anyone has. I requested this as a feature about 6 months ago, and I know at the time no one had done it, though a few others had requested something similar. I might get around to it at some point, though if anyone else wants to give it a shot go ahead!

I wanted to use it in exactly the same way, for the nightly syndicated reruns of shows like Seinfeld, Scrubs, Friends... Shows that I never get sick of watching over and over again, and are always good for background noise while cooking, eating, whatever when nothing else's on. Still I don't have the $$$ to shell out for 10 seasons or whatever of every show I watch, and I don't have the hard disk space to keep everything I ever record either. So I'd love to just keep taping them, and always have a rotating few to choose from.

My thoughts would be to make a script that runs daily, and checks for upcoming Favorites that are marked "Watched". It would be configured on a per-Favorite basis, so only if the Watched show was on your list would it clear the flag for that episode. That way, each show tapes the way you want them to with minimal impact on the Intelligent Recording & Suggestions features.

[QueOnda]

Originally Posted by lazysean

So I'd love to just keep taping them, and always have a rotating few to choose from.

You mean disking them? lol

Originally Posted by lazysean

My thoughts would be to make a script that runs daily, and checks for upcoming Favorites that are marked "Watched". It would be configured on a per-Favorite basis, so only if the Watched show was on your list would it clear the flag for that episode. That way, each show tapes the way you want them to with minimal impact on the Intelligent Recording & Suggestions features.

I would love this for my kids shows. They love watching things over and over.

[ChrisNH]

I will try clearing the watched status on a weekly basis or perhaps just when I notice that they are not recording again. Thanks for the tip!

Sounds like some good ideas on how to make this happen automatically in the future!


Chris

[jlmdxtv]

This question has been asked a number of times before but there is no automated solution yet. Lots of workarounds though. I use Nielms webserver regularly as described in an earlier post to clear Watched statuses on shows I want recorded again.

It's a valid and useful function that you're asking for. I've made the recommendation to the Sage developers in the past to allow Favorites Setup to include a "re-record on watched" checkbox or something similar.

Maybe if more people would communicate this need directly to them we'd get some attention. email: support@sagetv.com

john

[Slugger]

Here's a rough proof of concept idea for this functionality...

Stop SageTV, add the attached jar file along with gkusnick's tools jar file into your C:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV\JARs folder.

Add (or append) the following class to the load_at_startup_runnable_classes parameter in your Sage.properties file:
"com.google.code.sagetvaddons.favourites.ClearWatchedForFavs" (no quotes)

Restart SageTV

Create a file called favs.clear in C:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV\ and add the favourite id numbers of the favs you want the watched flag to be cleared for (one per line, get the fav id numbers from the web server).

Enjoy...

There are a few gotchas I can think of with this plugin... record the 8pm airing of Show X, watch and delete it that evening. If the same episode is on again that night then this plugin will clear the watched flag and record it again.

Not a lot of error checking... it assumes that each line in the favs.clear file is a valid integer and doesn't confirm nor catch the exception if it's not. In this case the thread will die off with no warning.

A nice GUI or something to configure things would obviously be nicer, but 40 mins of effort early on a Sat morning doesn't get you nice GUIs.

I briefly tested this against a few of my favourites and as long as you give it no surprises, it works rather nicely.

If someone wants to polish this up then just ask and I'll post the source code for this (under 50 lines total).

[briands]

I originally posted an idea for this back in 2005 and have submitted it to the developers at least once a year since then... still no dice...

If you like this idea, please submit a request to Sage. You can use the support link ... of course it has not worked for me so far... didn't realize it has been 3 1/2 years...