RS set folder for Auto scheduling and more precise name matching

rowanmoor

Member
Hi,

I have a couple of feature requests for the Auto Scheduling in RS.

1) I would like to be able to set the Folder in the auto search. At the moment I am creating searches and then when it has created the events I go in and change the folder. It would be neater (and less work) to be able to set the folder name in the search so that it created the events with the desired folder name. I know that is an oversimplification because a search can match a number of different program titles which by default will go to different folders if they create series events, but for me just putting them all in the same folder is the desired goal when I want to specify a folder.

2) I have a search for Coast which finds all the episodes of "Coast" and "Coast Australia". All good so far. However, there is now a program on called "Pembrokeshire: Coastal Lives" which I don't want it to find (and there will probably be others over time like "C list celebratory goes for a walk on the coast"). I may have missed an existing feature here, but what I would like is to be able to specify that the name should be a 'starts with' or equals match. I am used to the Toppy where the searching gives the options of 'Equals', 'Contains', 'Does not Contain', 'Starts With' and 'Ends With'. Alternatively, allowing some form of regular expression matching would do the job but would not be as user friendly for less techy users.
 
I have wondered about using sweeper for what I am trying to achieve with No 1, but I would have to set up sweeper rules at the same time as every search I create and the Humax isn't always turned on when I am doing that.

Did I read somewhere a week or two ago that someone suggested making RS use the sweeper style of comprehensive search options or did I imagine that? Is the sweeper code in any way useful in RS to make the job easier?
 
Did I read somewhere a week or two ago that someone suggested making RS use the sweeper style of comprehensive search options or did I imagine that?
You didn't imagine it, I suggested it a few weeks back, I think the RS search could also benefit from a simpler boolean 'IF, NOT, AND, OR' if the full sweeper search was considered a bit OTT
 
I would like to be able to set the Folder in the auto search.

This parallels my request for scheduling a series recording in the WebIF EPG, but note that this would not be possible for a single event (a non-series-linked recording). The Humax firmware does not accept a destination folder for single recording events and it records to My Video.

The original intention of sweeper was to automatically file recordings that landed in My Video according to a set of rules, and there is no reason it can't be set up to "guess" an appropriate destination folder based on title, genre, etc. My preference for RS scheduling is to set it for single events, because this is likely to be more reliable than broadcaster-generated series links. For instances where recordings are made to a series folder, the flatten package strips them to My Video where sweeper can do something with them, or sweeper itself is now able to replicate flatten (but I still use it).
 
I can certainly see that Sweeper (possibly with flatten) could do what I want. But in practice that would involve setting up enormous numbers of rules and having everything that is recorded as a series (most stuff for us) being moved into My Video and then refiled (potentially into the original folder name in some cases) which all seems a bit over complicated and unnecessary. Not to mention the fact that current recordings in progress would be in a different place to ones that finished a few minutes ago.

Whereas setting the folder in the auto scheduling would do the whole job at the point of setting up the search and everything would work as though it was the original default folder name for the series event.
 
There's a conceptual problem here. You say you want to record series to a folder of your choice, fair enough. But then you imply there could be a large number of these folders of your choice. In that case, what's wrong with leaving the recordings in their original series recording folder?

If what you actually want to do is to move some series to folder "dad" and others to folder "mum", we have the series-filer package for that, or the sweeper rule-based equivalent.
 
If what you actually want to do is to move some series to folder "dad" and others to folder "mum", we have the series-filer package for that, or the sweeper rule-based equivalent.
series-filer has been withdrawn and is no longer available, however sweeper now has a pre-defined rule to handle this
 
If what you actually want to do is to move some series to folder "dad" and others to folder "mum", we have the series-filer package for that, or the sweeper rule-based equivalent.
That is the kind of thing. It is about user friendly management and being able to find/classify stuff more easily. It is also partly to work round the relatively small number of entries/data you see on the media list as we are used to being able to see more entries with more data per entry on a Toppy.

I could do it all with sweeper but it has a couple of big drawbacks:
1 - Each time I create / delete an auto search I would have to do it in 2 places rather than one - in 2 separate web sites. And the Humax could be turned off or worse I could be doing it remotely so have no way of turning it on. It would be far easier and quicker to do it in one step in a single interface. On our old Toppy we have about 300 searches set up that have built up over the years. Some will probably never be on again, but it can be difficult to work out if a series is cancelled or just having a longer break than usual so there is some dead wood in there. This week something is back on after a 7 year break so I don't always clear stuff out just because it hasn't been on for a while.
2 - If a recording is in progress or just finished then that episode would be in a different place to the permanent location so we would not find it and just occasionally there is something we would watch in preference if we realised it was on at the time. And the extra directory for the current recording would take up extra space in the lists to make it harder to see everything in there.

I guess it comes down to how we watch stuff. We don't plan in advance that a particular program was just on so we will watch that. We sit down and think along the lines of having x minutes to watch something so what in the list takes our fancy. Sometimes that is something that was recorded a year or 2 ago.

It just seems logical to me to be able to set it in the one place in the search, but perhaps I am the only person who would have any use for that feature. Perhaps I'm the only one that uses change directory name for anything other than basic Newk type functionality.
 
I am still finding it difficult to get my head around your use for target folder renaming. For any series recording I might want to keep in the longer term, I pre-create the default folder and mark it "no flatten" - that series is then under My Video in a folder for that series. Anything that is a watch-and-delete gets recorded to My Video or a series folder, gets flattened into My Video, and then swept into a folder "[Unclassified]" which appears at the end of the Media list and therefore is a very few button presses away.

If you want to chase-play an in progress recording, you don't have to find it in the media list. First, you can identify any recordings in progress under Guide >> Schedule (yellow) - they have a red dot against them in the schedule list and will be at the top. Of course, you already know there is a recording in progress because the front panel ring is red. Change to the service being recorded either directly, through the EPG, or you can press OK and then the services are listed and again any being recorded will have a red dot against them. Now you can navigate the current programme just as if you had been watching it all the time and using the time shift buffer (even though you might have only joined that service near the end).

This does not affect the fact that I agree - it would be a useful feature to be able to specify the target folder for a series recording at the time of scheduling, whether through the WebIF EPG or the RS service. At present the item has to move from pending to the actual schedule before that option becomes available via the WebIF schedule browser.
 
I think our use cases are very different :)

We record very little that would classify as 'keep long term'. That is just the odd disney film and the like that gets moved off onto the NAS box for the kids.

Everything we watch is timeshift, but that timeshift window is very large hence at any one time there is a large amount recorded to look through. With your filing system, everything would be in the unclassified list - pretty much a disk full in the same list. When a disk gets too full I look through it and clear some stuff that we will probably never get round to watching.

As for chase playing - how would I know I want to chase play something if it did not appear in the list with everything else classified in the same way? I may know it is recording something from the ring, but that could be anything and checking a different place to find it is at best clunky and I would likely not do it. Even if it is something I want to watch I wouldn't know if I have seen all the previous episodes without checking.

Our viewing became abstracted from the TV schedules years ago. The only thought I ever give to the schedules is a once a week flick through the TV guide to see if there is anything new I want to record or sometimes thinking we won't start watching the first of a particular series because it hasn't recorded the end of the series yet so it would be weeks before we could watch the end of it and we would forget what happened.

I guess our viewing is best described as a personal streaming service like Netflix/Amazon Prime which only contains things we actually want to watch and we don't have to pay for because it is from a library of things we want to watch that has been recorded from the TV. Deciding what to watch is based on how long have we got; what genre do we want and what did we watch last - none if which is visible on the media list without drilling down into the directories unless I use a directory structure to file it. Does that make sense?

I have got used to spending very little time maintaining the schedule as well. Any pre-creating of folders etc would be a faff too far. I would rather spend the time watching it than recording it or deciding what to watch.

Changes to the main on-screen UI would be an even more welcome solution but I have no desire to try reverse engineering the main process myself and I can quite understand that no-one else wants to :D
 
Our "use cases" as you put it probably are different. I consider any recording (apart from specific long-term interest) as having a shelf life - if not reasonably current it has probably been superseded and has certainly missed its circulation in topical conversation. If things in [Unclassified] get more than a few weeks out of date they get deleted - there is always more telly coming along.
 
2) I have a search for Coast which finds all the episodes of "Coast" and "Coast Australia". All good so far. However, there is now a program on called "Pembrokeshire: Coastal Lives" which I don't want it to find (and there will probably be others over time like "C list celebratory goes for a walk on the coast"). I may have missed an existing feature here, but what I would like is to be able to specify that the name should be a 'starts with' or equals match. I am used to the Toppy where the searching gives the options of 'Equals', 'Contains', 'Does not Contain', 'Starts With' and 'Ends With'. Alternatively, allowing some form of regular expression matching would do the job but would not be as user friendly for less techy users.

I would just edit your current search and add "-coastal" and if new things turn up add them accordingly.
 
I would just edit your current search and add "-coastal" and if new things turn up add them accordingly.
That is what I am doing at the moment. From my experience of the early days of the Toppy that sort of thing can get quite complicated over time - an endless battle to keep adding 'exceptions' to the searches when you have a lot of searches set up. Being able to set most things as starts with / exact matches from the start tends to cover most of the exceptions before you ever find them.
 
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