Open Webif mod

[david1st]

I use open webif daily to check the program guide to select what I want to record and I love it to bits.

The one thing I would LOVE to have is the ability to select a program I am NEVER going to watch and be able to hit a 'Never Show Me This Again' button.

I'm constantly seeing programs like 'The Wot Wots' that I have to read to move onto what I am interested in. It would be heaven to have a super-stripped down Guide that had none of this distracting junk on it.

I know it's something that the open webif people are probably responsible for, but I can dream....

[prl]

You can use bouquets to remove whole channels from the guide (like infomercial channels), but there's no facility for removing lists of programs from the guide.

The WotWots are on five times a week, on one channel. Is it really so hard to read past them?

[david1st]

Hi Peter,

Home Shopping, House Husbands, The Project, The Talk, Media Watch, The Musketeers, Hells Kitchen USA, RSPCA Animal Rescue, TV Shop - Home Shopping, Danoz, Sold On The Spot, Balls Of Steel Australia, Friemds, Black Jesus, Walker Texas Ranger, Global Shop, Skippy - The Bush Kangaroo, Diagnosis Murder, Ellen, Today, CBS - This Morning, The King Of Queens, Antiques Roadshow, Pointless, Arthur, Scout And The Gumboot Kids, Playdate, Heywire, Food Lovers Guide to Australia, CGTN English News, NHK World English News, Punjabi News, Sri Lankan Sinhalese News, Korean News, Indonesian News, Million Dollar Minute, Harrys Practice, NBC Today, Medical Rookies, Swamp People, Joyce Meyer, Heartbeat, Come Dine with me, The New Lookey Tunes, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Power Rangers, Regal Academy, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

AND that's only the junk I don't want to sort through on a few short hours next Thursday!

This could change minutes of sorting through garbage to seconds of only having the options I'm interested in, plus the new stuff I might be interested in would stick out.

A personalised TV Guide without all the rubbish - Priceless.

Please think about it. This would turn a machine I really like into one I'd love tenderly, faithfully and forever.

[Gully]

That sounds like a long list that you don't want to record so why not create Autotimers for those shows you do want?

Might be the simplest solution.

[prl]

Even if it existed, it sounds like an excessive amount of work to set up, to me.

All the shopping channel stuff can be eliminated by using a favourite list to remove those channels completely from the EPG.

[david1st]

Gully, I do use autotimers, but I also have to sort through all that dross just to find if there's any new series, specials, documentaries or movies I'd like to watch buried under that huge pile of drek.

Peter, I think it would integrate into the current setup neatly. There's an empty space for a new icon above the "IMDB' icon. There would only be two small subroutines involved: One to build a list of items. and another in the EPG display module to check if items matched anything on that list before displaying them. Maybe grey irrelevancies out, or highlight the good stuff with a different colour?

As for the work of setting up such a list, it's just a matter of clicking on an item, then clicking on the 'Don't show me this on my EPG ever again' icon.

It's such an unnecessary time-waster sorting through all this garbage. If computers are useful for anything it's for sorting out junk. Sure, sometime soon, someone is going to create a more complex, AI version of what I'm proposing. Tivo did a pretty poor job of it a few years ago, but just for now I think we can add some useful extra functionality to a system that could really do with it. Something nobody's ever put into a PVR before. Something that can be implemented with two or three short, simple subroutines.

There are thousands of items in the EPG each week. I'm only interested in a very few of them. How sweet would it be if the job of finding those few rare gems was about 50 times easier?

Anyway, thanks for your time. David

[IanSav]

Hi David,

Keep in mind that the filtering that you suggest will be just as susceptible to the same issues effecting timers. That is, broadcasters keep changing the titles of their programs. They often do this just to frustrate PVR owners who try to set timers for selected events. This is done by changing the title or adding words etc. Filtering the EPG could become just as troublesome.

Regards,
Ian.

[david1st]

Hi Ian, Yes it would be susceptible to the same electrobastardry, though I haven't noticed much of that lately.

I just want a TV Guide that isn't polluted with thousands of shows I am never going to watch.

Read my previous posts. What I'm proposing is something that has never been seen on a PVR before which is genuinely useful and can be implemented easily.

[Paul_oz53]

Hi Ian, Yes it would be susceptible to the same electrobastardry, though I haven't noticed much of that lately.

I just want a TV Guide that isn't polluted with thousands of shows I am never going to watch.

Read my previous posts. What I'm proposing is something that has never been seen on a PVR before which is genuinely useful and can be implemented easily.

As much as I agree that there is a huge amount of dross that I would never watch polluting the airwaves, I suspect the market for the personally curated EPG would be relatively small. The effect of what you seek is to highlight programs you do watch or might want to watch, by hiding the rest.

On the other hand, users of IceTV (like myself) and Autotimers (there are many) build lists of the things we want to watch. These programs are highlighted in the EPG so we can ignore most of the rest. To this, we will want to add "What's new and interesting".

IceTV (a paid service) does a fairly basic service in this regard. Sometimes OK - often incomplete. Websites like TV Tonight are another source of upcoming programs to add as preprogrammed shows in IceTV or as autotimers. This is where I get a lot of what I want to add, if not from stations relentlessly advertising new shows (many of which are a waste of time!).

The end result is in my EPG I get the reverse sense of the effect you want - what I might want to watch is highlighted in red. The point here is my list of what I want to watch is hard to manage with a list of barely 100 programs. A list of what I don't want to watch would probably extend to many hundreds of programs over time. For most people, that would be unmanageable.

Unless you have the programming skills to write software to download an open source EPG from someone like the OzTivo folk and process it against a list you manage yourself, I doubt that this feature will eventuate. Although it is a novel idea, it is just too niche to have wide appeal.

Another factor against it is that an EPG with blank holes will puzzle unsophisticated users. The EPG would only be meaningful to the individual that curated the list of hidden programs. Not so long back a major bug affecting IceTV was blank holes in the EPG. I for one have no desire to ever see that again.

A minor point and apologies if I seem a little pedantic, this is not the best area of the forum for this thread. You are raising the prospect of a new feature for the T/U series PVRs. A better location might have been Bug Reporting and Feature Requests.