malore's "Viewing History"?

[pengdahl]

This feels like a newbie question, but I can't quite seem to figure out what the "Viewing History" page is for.

It shows me every show I've tuned to. That's great, as far as it goes, but what if I want to interact with this list?

Selecting an item simply makes it change to italics. I have no idea what this means.

I can "delete" an item, and a menu comes up that lets me delete the item. However, after I've deleted it, it still shows on the list.

Am I missing something?

[Opus4]

I don't know if you _can_ delete an entry in the viewing history.

The ones listed in italics are watched shows.

The usefulness of this screen is the ability to go change the watched or like/don't like status of shows from the past. You've watched all the shows for a series & want to watch them again? Simply sort by show title & use "Clear All Watched" in the pop-up Options menu, for example.

- Andy

[pengdahl]

Since I posted this originally I've figured more out about the Viewing History page. In particular, I discovered the following:

Clicking on an entry sets the "watched" status (Italics means it's watched)

Moving to the right on an entry gives you a menu that allows you to set like/don't like status.

Right-clicking brings up a menu that lets you set status on an entire tree.

However, I really think that if it's possible, the ability to actually *remove* an entry from this list should exist.

In particular, since Sage uses a statistical algorithm to determing what shows to record when IR is on, and it apparently uses the viewing history for its datapoints, having the ability to remove entries as well as set like/don't like status would give you the maximum control when training IR.

For example, in my viewing history, apparently I once tuned to a program about babies. I have no children, so I'm not really interested in shows about babies, but IR has chosen to record many other baby shows anyway. I can go through them all and set "don't like", but I'd rather simply remove them from the list, since I don't really dislike babies and I don't want to make "no baby shows" a hard and fast rule.

Also the "viewing history" list gets very cluttered.

I guess this is really a feature request for Malore then, since it isn't already there.

I know I'm not the first one to mention this, either - after checking the thread about Malore's STV, I noticed at least one use who didn't really want the world to know that he watches the "Care Bears".

Just some suggestions!

[Opus4]

As far as I know, IR doesn't consider shows that are not watched at all and are not marked as don't like. When I want something ignored, I clear its watched status so that none of it is shown as watched (enable the blue/watched bars to see how much you've watched) and clear the dislike status. Of course, if I don't like it, I'll leave that part set. In a similar way, I've grouped by category & then marked entire categories as not liked.

I'm not sure if SageTV ever automatically removes items from the list if the show has no flags set at all, but I wouldn't mind being able to remove things too.

- Andy

[bgorrell]

Time to bring this thread back to life. I too would like the ability to delete viewing history. The primary reason is I have duplicates for many of my favorite shows. I'm not sure how this happened, but it is very annoying. I would say about a third of my shows are listed twice.

When checking the shows through the webserver, I find almost every detail to be the same except for the Internal AiringID. In some cases, the air date is different because the show is in re-runs, but the ShowID, description, original air date and everything else are identical.

I'm sure it has something to do with having this wiz.bin since SageTV version 1 and having changed cable providers on numerous occasions (and using XMLTV way back). On the other hand, it has created some duplicates in the past year even. I'd like to clean it out.

Is there anyway a remove feature can be added to either the viewing history or webserver?

P.S. Another advantage of this would be to get rid of random one-time viewings that are cluttering up the history view.

[Opus4]

I guess I forgot to come back with a follow-up post a long time ago...

If you clear all the markings for a show (clear Watched and Don't Like, but you may have to set it to completely watched before clearing watched again), then the show should be removed from the database during the next EPG update. But, I believe that some shows will remain in the DB regardless, such as Favs or Manual Recordings. The fav data is still 'important', so the show info will be kept.

This can be done in the Viewing History menu or the web server. V3 also has ways to see historical show data too now.

- Andy

[bgorrell]

Thanks Opus, that technique will work for some of the "Junk" that's accumulated. However, my problem with duplicates is mostly on "Favorites". As an example, I've been trying to backfill episodes of various series from re-runs. I use Viewing History sorted by ShowID to see whether I missed an episode or not. I am finding I have duplicates of some. See the attached image. I don't want to lose the watched information on these.

I also have some history from when I used an XMLTV import that didn't include ShowIDs. I want to get rid of those as well.