This is all I care about. I just want to make sure recordings get enough information for Automatic Metadata Lookup to work right.
The trouble with that is, what if someone wants to record all movies made by a particular director? The basic information in the EPG often won't include Director, and a user certainly couldn't rely on it. Other examples of key data that might be used to select what to record and Actor names, all movies, all comedy/Sci-Fi/Action movies, all David Attenborough's works, Anime made before 2000, The Big Bang Theory - Season 5 only, etc.
All those sorts of selection criteria for recording rules require all the programs to be looked up
before the program is aired and recorded, not after the fact as MC does. I don't look through my Guide data and look up all that sort of stuff. That is what I want a computer to do for me. You know, actually save me time rather than just give me more work to do. I think I would be in the majority here as well, if users were given the option.
With those sort of recording rules, based on good quality EPG data, I could always have something interesting recorded waiting for me to watch. Legally recorded, rather than downloaded.
This is an area where MC is lagging miles and miles behind other, usually older solutions, such as DigiGuide, BeyondTV, Sage, Big Screen EPG with a good EPG source, and so on. MC almost misses the
point of having a good EPG. The basic design of the EPG process in MC means that reliably gathering the data for the above data can only be done using external programs, and loaded into MC using XMLTV files.
But then, MC doesn't have the recording rules capabilities to select programs based on the additional information. It can only select based on the program name, or part thereof. Pretty lame really, or at least very, very basic, and missing out on enormous potential.
DigiGuide looks like it uses various Grabbers and/or Scrappers to gather its data. This approach has been used a lot in Australia, but it is usually met pretty quickly with changes in the source web sites so that Scrappers don't work. Grabbers which used approved methods of downloading the data were removed years ago, which is why Scrappers have been used extensively. We still have one source, Shepherd, which is supposed to use a range of Scrappers that are "self correcting" if a web site changes. But it is Linux based and pretty old now, so I'm not sure if it still works. Astromo was going to have a look at some time. DigiGuide also seems to get data from the IMDB site. I thought that was stopped some time back, at least without a licence to do so. Maybe DigiGuide has some grandfathered approval, or maybe that part no longer works.
I'd love a simple description of what is needed to get Series, Season, and Episode tags filled as reliably as is possible for US users. If there is a good thread, a link would be useful.
I've never seen one good thread or write-up to do even just that, as there are so many sources, and data is different for different areas, and people use different services to receive TV. We now have supposedly multiple EPG sources for the US, zap2it (via zap2xml), Rovi (via mc2xml independently or via MC), and Schedules Direct (via mc2xml, and ??). Pick your poison!
