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Feature request(?) - Keep most recent only

Ross

Ross

New Member
Having just gone through deleting a million episodes of In the Night Garden my wife set the Hummy up to record before we went on holiday, I wanted to know if there was a option to keep on the most recent x episodes of a programme. Does this option exist on the custom firmware already? I did search the forum and the package list, to no avail - but maybe I used the wrong search terms.

Usage scenarios:

1. Your 13-month old daughter loves In the Night Garden, which is on every day. Your wife sets your Humax to record every episode. You come back from holiday to find all your recording failed for reasons of space, and you have 100+ hours of kiddie TV that nobody will ever watch. Sooo... you set the miraculous package to delete all but the last five (variable) episodes on log-in from here after. Your marriage is saved.

2. You like watching the news headlines at night, but are never around at 10pm sharp and have a pathological hatred of rolling news channels and you always miss the big stories amongst the filler. So you want to record the most recent news, but not to build up a news library. So you set the Humax to series record the news, but to delete all but the oldest one. You go to bed happy each night.
 
The option you're looking for is Auto-Expire which can be set on a per-folder basis through the web interface. It works on a number of days rather than episode, but will probably do what you need. Remember that with the undelete package installed they will live on for a while in the dustbin.
 
Can see a use for that if I've missed it too!

Further scenarios...

You have to continously go through and remove watched episodes of Horrid Henry, Simpsons, Almost Naked Animals and a million other things recorded by everyone, watched and never deleted, along with the "oh but he likes those" 140 Postman Pat to struggle to get the box above 10% free space so "important" things like Home & Away and Coronation Street get recorded.

So "Keep maximum of x", "Keep all unwatched", "Keep the latest x unwatched", "Delete over 1 week old", "Delete because it is a 3 hour program recorded on HD channel you will never watch" options or similar could be very helpful :-)

OK would be easiest to swap the 500Gb drive for 2Tb but finding a slot between all those recordings long enough to do it....
 
Ross said:
2. You like watching the news headlines at night, but are never around at 10pm sharp and have a pathological hatred of rolling news channels and you always miss the big stories amongst the filler. So you want to record the most recent news, but not to build up a news library. So you set the Humax to series record the news, but to delete all but the oldest one. You go to bed happy each night.
Click to expand...
I think you mean latest one. Precisely what I do, auto-expire works very well for this and I keep four days worth of national and local news.
 
My own bugbear is the multiple instances of the same episode (confined to cbeebies) as they repeat the episodes regularly (not daily, but every 3/5 weeks depending on number of episodes in series). It's not a huge deal to be fair though.
 
It would be nice to have the option to keep just a number of episodes. I have a couple of folders set to 1 day, when I really want 1 episode. Its not a big as you say as you can always get the last episode via the dustbin...
 
af123 - Wow. I never knew that was there. A very useful feature, and yes, I think it is likely to do everything I need, even though it specifies by days instead of by 'most recent episodes'. Many thanks again for you expertise and input. The Hummy is one of the few purchases that - with the support of this community - gets better the longer you own it.
 
Black Hole said:
There is the dedup package for that, but use it carefully.
Click to expand...
It's built-in to the web interface these days. You should use manual dedup through the web interface initially to be confident that the EPG data is amenable to the process prior to enabling automatic-dedup. I use it on most of the kids' series.
 
dragon-it said:
So "Keep maximum of x", "Keep all unwatched", "Keep the latest x unwatched", "Delete over 1 week old", "Delete because it is a 3 hour program recorded on HD channel you will never watch" options or similar could be very helpful :)
Click to expand...
I'm sure I can extend it to include some of these..
 
Thanks af123, I suppose "delete it 'cos you want the space and they'll never notice it has gone" option is harder to define...

I wonder whether it is also possible to consider a flattened directory structure view of all files at some point that could then be sorted by size, or at least the biggest "x" files for when a quick fix is needed to free up space etc.

e.g. I can manually target certain series directories with big size showing but have to take into account that a"Postman Pat" directory although 35Gb has some 130 programs in but an inadvertently series recorded multi-hour HD broadcast might be less obvious?

thanks

Steve
 
Black Hole - not sure whether you are talking about something in the web-if - the one on the TV interface in Media nearly always has barely a line showing on it for free space!

I do it manually anyway but was just suggesting if you could effectively get something like this:

Films\Film name - 8Gb
Films \Film name 2 - 8Gb
Kids stuff \ Long HD program - 6Gb
Accidental 8 hour recording in root - 5Gb

or whatever then it would be very easy to spot where the biggest use by specific programs as opposed to collectively for a series is

Steve
 
I'm talking WebIF, there's nothing that can be done to alter the directory listings on the standard interface. There are graphical utilities on PC which make it easy to see what files and folders are using the most disk space, I was just thinking that something similar would do the job here.
 
af123 said:
I'm sure I can extend it to include some of these..
Click to expand...

I'm not sure if it is good form to reply to old threads, but... are you still considering these features, please?

I would like to add my request for expiring based on the number of files in a dir, not just how old they are.

I record several series for my daughter, so she has things to watch when there's nothing on live. I don't want to keep more than the last 6, say of each series. But I don't want any less than that, either.

With the current auto-expire, if I set it to 6 days, it will do what I want until that series stops, and then it will slowly empty that dir until there are none left, right?

So, either having a "number of programmes" option, or perhaps sticking with days, but allowing a "leave at least X progs behind option"? or both? :)

thanks much indeed.
 
Would it be possible to remove the fixed Workgroup setting from Samba smb.cfg and make it a parameter in Settings.

Because I don't use WORKGROUP for my home network it means that I have to edit the config and swap files around whenever samba is released.

I'm sure I can't be the only user that doesn't use the default "WORKGROUP".
 
I use MSHOME. I can't understand why MS chopped and changed around their 'default' workgroup names. That must have caused no end of people aggro when they did.
 
HarveyB said:
Would it be possible to remove the fixed Workgroup setting from Samba smb.cfg and make it a parameter in Settings.

Because I don't use WORKGROUP for my home network it means that I have to edit the config and swap files around whenever samba is released.

I'm sure I can't be the only user that doesn't use the default "WORKGROUP".
Click to expand...
No you're not. I don't either and it's a right nuisance the way Samba works. I tried moving the workgroup setting in the [global] section into another file, but it seems you can't split the same section across files as it failed miserably. You can split complete sections however. It's just brain-dead coding.
 
I've been using my own group, not one of M'soft for quite a number of years - helps when temporarily plugging in strange PCs o my network
 
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