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[FlatView] Provide flattened view of recordings

Ezra Pound said:
The point is that flatview is non destructive, if you don't use the [Flatview] folder then everything else is as it was before it was installed, it provides the best of both worlds, unlike flatten which destroys the folder hierarchy permanently (with the possible exception of af123's recent fix) . Would you like to explain the advantages of flatten over flatview in YOUR opinion?
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Destroying the series directory hierarchy is in my opinion IS the advantage of flatten - I can move stuff into folders or mark the folder as 'no flatten' on the rare occasions that I do want to isolate recordings.

While I am evaluating FlatView and want to ensure detactads works well with it I am unconvinced as yet whether the extra complexity delivers extra value for my usage of the Humax. Everybodies needs are different and for now there is definitely a place for both packages
 
Quite so. Who wants series folders hanging around unless they are for series one intends to save rather than watch-and-delete?

As an alternative to flatten, prpr's empty-folder-tidy-up utility (whatever it's called) would make a good companion to flatview, but I find it odd that somebody who has previously championed choice should now advocate dictatorship!
 
How about this: have a flatview mode which does not scan for entries at all, and a sweeper action which puts a proxy into the [FlatView] (or other) folder. That would make the recordings which get listed entirely under pattern matching at the user's whim, with management of deletion etc available to the SUI.

Could flatview be extended to manage multiple folders?
 
Just to report that af123's wonderful unflatten diagnostic(s) worked 100% perfectly; my friend is very happy, thank you :)

No, it's still not me :)
 
af123 said:
Do you know if the box is linked to RS? If this doesn't work then I may be able to extract the original folder structure from an RS database backup.
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No, it wasn't linked.

Oddly, I thought it wouldn't work, since he was sure that he had content sharing turned on (indeed, it's hard not to be sure, given the red warning in the webif). But it did work, and when he checked, content sharing was off, although he claims that he didn't do that himself. odd. Anyway, it worked...

It might be worth adding a mention of the new diagnostics to the flatten wiki entry?
 
Black Hole said:
Who wants series folders hanging around unless they are for series one intends to save rather than watch-and-delete?
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Who wants them (empty ones that is) hanging around even if they are for watch and delete on a regular basis? They get recreated anyway.
As an alternative to flatten, prpr's empty-folder-tidy-up utility (whatever it's called) would make a good companion to flatview
Click to expand...
It was called tidy-folders, but it was never available in the repository.
 
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Black Hole said:
I find it odd that somebody who has previously championed choice should now advocate dictatorship!
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So anyone who expresses an opinion on this website is advocating dictatorship are they?, I think regular users of this site are quite aware who the dictator is around here and it certainly isn't me
 
It does seem that the most recent entry in FlatView does not get a Location field added to Media Details, even many hours after it has been recorded.
 
Ezra Pound said:
So anyone who expresses an opinion on this website is advocating dictatorship are they?, I think regular users of this site are quite aware who the dictator is around here and it certainly isn't me
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You know very well you were advocating that flatview should replace flatten, leaving the users no choice and as if your particular usage can be the only usage. To claim otherwise is disingenuous.

You said that, in your opinion, there was no point in keeping flatten now we have flatview, I (and others) replied that is not the case, and instead of just shutting up about it you challenged it. That's the mistake - the challenge implies you do not accept that others may disagree with your opinion.

When I object to being taken to task it is because I am not even being allowed my opinion.
 
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Black Hole said:
You know very well you were advocating that flatview should replace flatten, leaving the users no choice and as if your particular usage can be the only usage. To claim otherwise is disingenuous.

You said that, in your opinion, there was no point in keeping flatten now we have flatview, I (and others) replied that is not the case, and instead of just shutting up about it you challenged it.
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Hear hear - choice is good and I have no intention to integrate either of these into the core web interface- people can choose what suits their way of working. I am intending to make flatten default to disabled following installation though!
 
Black Hole said:
As an alternative to flatten, prpr's empty-folder-tidy-up utility (whatever it's called) would make a good companion to flatview
Click to expand...

If you remove a recording from the flatview flattened area it will be removed from its original location in the hierarchy and, if that results in an empty folder, that folder will be automatically removed. Another idea I took from xyz321's original code. It means that people who generally view and delete from the flattened area have empty folders removed.

prpr said:
It was called tidy-folders, but it was never available in the repository.
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I don't remember ever having been asked to put it in there. I didn't look at it myself but I'm sure some people would appreciate it if you were to publish it - nowadays it should hook into the automatic processing as a plugin rather than running from cron though.
 
MontysEvilTwin said:
I've attached two files, the first was without FlatView installed, then I reinstalled and repeated. It looks better, but the FV folder only has three recordings in it at the moment, one of which is River, which is one of the culprits.
I have now changed the 'ignore files older than' setting from 2 days back to 7 days (how it was before) and I've attached another file (output from the link you supplied) now the 22.25 cronjob has run. There are more discrepancies in Web-If again now the contents of the FV folder have increased.
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I think this may be just something inherent in having multiple links to the same file in the filesystem. The web interface uses the 'du' command to get disk usage for a folder and presumably this is being a bit too clever here. I will have to look at the busybox source code to work out what it is doing and how to fix it.

If you run this on the command line, what do you see?

Code: 
humax# cd /media/My\ Video
humax# /mod/bin/busybox/du -h -d 1 .

I'm guessing you get the smaller sizes that you see in the web interface.
Picking a folder which is smaller than it should be, what about:

Code: 
humax# /mod/bin/busybox/du -h River/*
 
af123 said:
If you remove a recording from the flatview flattened area it will be removed from its original location in the hierarchy and, if that results in an empty folder, that folder will be automatically removed. Another idea I took from xyz321's original code. It means that people who generally view and delete from the flattened area have empty folders removed.
Click to expand...
How do you define "empty"? I don't think this is a good idea if there is a .noflatten flag in it.

This would also provide a function for the .noflatten flag for users without flatten installed: to mark a folder they don't want summarily deleted if it happens to become empty (of recordings). Alternatively there could be a .donotdelete flag (and the presence of the flag could trigger a warning in the WebIF if the user tried to delete the folder via the WebIF media browser).
 
af123 said:
I don't remember ever having been asked to put it in there.
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No, it was only ever available on Dropbox and seemed to attract general negativity so I removed it.
nowadays it should hook into the automatic processing as a plugin rather than running from cron though.
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I don't quite see how. I presume I'd need some hook into the inotify stuff but I'm struggling to find an example. It seems more like a sibling of recmon than something descended from it, as deletion is obviously nothing to do with recording.
Anyway, inotify doesn't look too hard to wrap in C++ and then use...
 
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