Advanced Pass

Channels DVR Server
#1

First off, the AppleTV app is outstanding. Nothing comes close to it!

I have question on the “advanced pass.” Is there any plan to make changes to this in the near future? Advanced pass is similar to EyeTV’s “Smart Guide” but is not as flexible.

Two thoughts to make this better:

  1. “Tags” should include words found in the description of the show. Right now “tags” does not include keywords from the show’s description. For example, I was making an advanced pass containing “Gordon Ramsay” as a tag. However, nothing came up even though “Gordon Ramsay” was in the description of the show. An alternative could be to add an “actor” tag to search.

  2. Allow to save an advanced pass with a “contains” instead of requiring a “=”. This would make it so much more flexible to find shows with actors that I like.

#2

Thanks!

Tags refer specifically to guide data tags like Live, New, HDTV etc as provided by our guide partner.

At the moment we don’t have actor data or show descriptions readily available in the guide data that’s downloaded into the DVR. Show descriptions are fetched on demand when you are looking at a specific show.

The way the advanced pass works right now, it searches episode airings. So it would be possible to add another rule type like “Description CONTAINS Ramsey” but that would match episode descriptions not show descriptions. The reason this is not currently implemented is because full text search is quite resource intensive, and building a search index of all episode descriptions would require several gigabytes and a lot more CPU/RAM.

Hmm I thought this bug was fixed. I will double check.

I’ve not used EyeTV or its smart guide. I’ll try to check it out sometime.

#3

@tmm1:

I don’t remember “contains” as being sufficient to complete an advanced pass…in the interim I have been adding “Channel=xx” which allows the save.

1 Like
#4

It allows me to press the save button if it doesn’t have a “=” in the advanced pass, but it does not appear below under the listed advanced passes so I assume it is not created.

#5

Thanks for the clarification on tags. Based on the guide information, it is very difficult to do a broad search for any show/movie that an actor is in.

Although you can search for tags, title, date, etc. these generic tags aren’t too helpful.

#6

Is there any chance we could get this feature? I understand you might not want to do it on a smaller server, but if the server has enough CPU/RAM, could we do it? I'd like to shift off my MythTV to channels, but I have some advanced searches I do in MythTV that does have this ability, and I don't want to lose functionality.

#7

What feature specifically are you referring? What are some examples of advanced searches you're using in MythTV that don't work at the moment?