I SECOND THIS. I can not say it strong enough. Yeah, I know what you mean. Unlike those big tags, strong tags don't have any effect when you nest them 3, 4, 5, or more levels deep.
One more followup. I feel dumb for never realizing this (or maybe I knew it at one point and forgot), but you can edit the channels through the mythweb interface. That would be the easiest way to delete the old channels and rename the new. Oh well.
Quick update...everything seems to work now. The season passes weren't an issue. Once I got the channel names and callsigns corrected (using mythfilldatabase with the --manual option) and then eliminated the conflict with the old channels (I could probably delete them from the DB, but I didn't want to do that just in case, so I just updated their callsigns to prefix with OLD-). All the season passes resolved automatically, so they must be tracking based on channel number and call sign rather than the internal id.
Thanks. Since my post, I already figured out how. mythfilldatabase with the --file parameter.
Only problem now is getting the channels working correctly. First they all came in with screwed up names. I corrected all the names to be like they were before, and now it appears the names are conflicting with the old channels of the same callsign, so most of the data isn't showing up. After I work that out, the last issue (I hope) is that the season passes which are set to record off a specific channel seem not to translate over to the channels because they have a different internal id.
I know you said you don't use mythtv, so it means nothing to you...just saying in case anyone else follows this thread.
It's hardly myth's fault if the SD guys demand the latest version.
First of all, the SD team includes 2 people from MythTV. But thats not important. However they want to provide the data is fine. However, there is the end fact that the same basic information has to be there. Start time, end time, date, show name, subtitle, episode description, and a few others. MythTV should have created a simple script to dump the SD data to an xmltv format that could be read by any version of xmltv. As far as I'm aware, backward compatability isn't much of an issue for xmltv. In my experience so far its degraded gracefully. However, the only solution they offer is to upgrade to a version that was just released. They don't even bother to support versions that previous release (from back in April). The only version supported was literally released a couple days before the changeover deadline.
And yes, if you don't upgrade your box you'll miss out on new features - when has this never been the case?
Sorry, but when did I ever ask to get new features? In fact, I outright admitted that, yes, I am missing out on some new features but I don't care. And before you even suggest it, no I don't consider "preventing myself from losing guide data and thus having my PVR turn into a dumb digital VCR" a new feature.
I'm sure the differences in interface and DB schema between your version and the latest make it an impossible task to support every single myth release in the last two years.
They don't need to worry about the schema of my database. The version of mythfilldatabase that came with my mythtv installation knows all about the schema. All it needs is an xmltv formatted xml file.
Now, as I'm going through this process of getting things working, playing with parts of mythtv I've never seen before, and understanding how the whole process works, I'm starting to realize that its probably very possible to just download the new version of XMLTV that handles Schedules Direct data, get that to dump out the xmltv file, and feed that into mythfilldatabase. If so, that is a great solution for people with older versions. However, why couldn't the mythtv guys have announced that as another option for getting the SD data? If you go to the website, they only suggest one solution to the problem: upgrade to the 0.20.2 version.
Thanks. I just got that script setup and now have the xml file ready to go. Anyone have any pointers on exactly how to go about getting it into mythtv?
Thanks for posting this. I've been meaning to look for something like this, but have been to busy to get around to it. I really think MythTV dropped the ball a bit here. Yeah, the schedules direct thing is great, but it requires the absolute newest version of mythtv to work. I'm sorry, but my version of mythtv is 2 years old. Yes, I'm aware of the many improvements that have been made, but when it comes to recording my TV programs, I want something that is stable and tested. My mythbox has performed almost 100% flawlessly for 2 years now, and I'm content with what it offers.
I don't have time now to patch it and test it. When I build my next upgraded mythbox (probably early next year), I'll gladly pay for schedules direct. However, for now I'd rather revert to old VCR style manual scheduling than try to patch a box which I know I won't have time to rebuild if things don't go smoothly.
No they aren't. They did keep the service up for several days after the deadline, but it stopped working almost a week ago (even though my subscription is still good until the 20th). Mythfilldatabase is now saying
Resolving datadirect.webservices.zap2it.com... failed: Host not found.
He then used Viacom's derivative work, but, it seems, didn't provide any commentary on the clip you uploaded to YouTube. Instead, he just made a direct copy. That's copyright infringement. Sure he did. He posted it on his blog, then discussed how funny the segment was, and then went on about how it turns out that, through exposure like this, his cheesy campaign ad is actually doing more for awareness of the causes he supports than it did for his career, but that he's ok with that because trying to fix those problem is more important to him than the job he ran for.
The problem is that his commentary was textual with the video embedded, so when you see it directly on youtube you don't see any of that corresponding commentary (unless he posted commentary in the comments too...no way to know now, since the page is gone).
Actually, I never read the books but I got it perfectly fine before you even made this last post. And how did I get it? Well, from all the slashdotters who never tire of taking any opportunity they can to point out how the movie sucks because it left out the scouring of the shire and Tom Bombadil.
In that case, I'll repost my comment, too:
People donate blood to them not realizing that they are selling it to hospitals at market value. Of course they sell it. Do you realize how expensive it is to test, process, store, and distribute blood. They'd go broke in no time flat if they just gave it away.
You complain about not using money for a specific cause, but would you complain about the times when they give more to a cause than they get in donations for that cause? Where the hell do you think all that money comes from.
You seem to have a misguided idea of what the concept of non-profit means. It doesn't mean they don't make a profit off of any specific activity. They are more than welcome to make huge profits of anything they do as long as those profits are used elsewhere charitably. The idea of being non-profit simply means any excess revenue isn't distributed to shareholders.
People donate blood to them not realizing that they are selling it to hospitals at market value. Of course they sell it. Do you realize how expensive it is to test, process, store, and distribute blood. They'd go broke in no time flat if they just gave it away.
You complain about not using money for a specific cause, but would you complain about the times when they give more to a cause than they get in donations for that cause? Where the hell do you think all that money comes from.
You seem to have a misguided idea of what the concept of non-profit means. It doesn't mean they don't make a profit off of any specific activity. They are more than welcome to make huge profits of anything they do as long as those profits are used elsewhere charitably. The idea of being non-profit simply means any excess revenue isn't distributed to shareholders.
However, I need point out that there are more than just rumors at play. Jan and Feb includes leftover buyers from Xmas time and spring is just soft in general. Even as of mid December, the supply issues were pretty much over. Everywhere I looked, listened, and read, people were well aware that all they had to do was walk into a store and grab their PS3, so I don't think that really had a whole lot to do with it. However, its impossible to draw any valid conclusions...all we can do is speculate, so its kind of pointless debating this part of it. Too many factors influencing things simultaneously.
I find it hard to believe the Wii experienced exactly the same historical trends as every other console in history purely because of supply issues. Well, since even now, 9 months later, no Wiis sit on the shelves for more than 24 hours (except maybe in some small towns), it has to be purely a supply issue. If every single unit that gets shipped sells through right away, and even then there are still people disappointed that they didn't get one, theres only one place to lay the credit/blame.
If I had to guess, I'd guess the insightful was probably for the 3rd sentence, not the first or second. I don't really need to give irrelevant anecdotes to back it up...Sony's given us enough relevant ones to prove that taking them for their word isn't a safe bet.
As for VGCharts and your comment of "looks like more than a 135% increase to me"...2 points:
1) The numbers posted now are different than what you posted, so it would seem that these stats are in flux. 2) Back in Jan/Feb, sales of the PS3 were up in the 50K range. Then the rumors came out the the PS3 was soon going to drop in price. Sales dropped down into the low 20K range and stayed there for a while. Now that the price dropped, sales jumped up. So is it really appropriate to take the lower sales that are a result of people waiting for a price drop and to use that as the baseline to see how much sales increased when they dropped the price? If so, then why doesn't sony just increase the price of the PS3 to $999,999,999.99 for 2 weeks, then drop it back to its regular price and say "wow...we incresed sales by 5000000%
Because my post wasn't addressing your specific scenario, but a general scenario instead. It might not be your personal banking password (which you use as home) that we are referring to. Instead, it might be passwords you use at the office, including internal accounts (email, accounting database, website administration), external business accounts(accounts with suppliers and other business partners, administering the retirement and health insurance plans, etc), and maybe even some personal accounts that you access on your lunch hour.
though independent confirmation of that jump is not yet available
Honestly, I wouldn't believe anything I heard from Sony. If it were a sunny day and Sony told me the sky were blue, I'd probably still look up to be sure. For all we know, what they really meant was that they shipped 135% more PS3s into the retail channel in anticipation for increased sales.
Did I detect a hint of sarcasm? Well then let me explain it for you.
Suppose you signup for online banking and setup a password. Then you signup for some stupid website and use the same password. The problem is, you don't know if you can trust that 2nd site with your online banking password. They may just be phishing for passwords. Or maybe they are honest but incompetent enough to store your password in the DB in plain text, conveniently waiting there for the next hacker to locate.
The solution: Use separate passwords for the 2 sites? But then how do you start partitioning things? Do all the banking sites get the same password, your email a different password, you photo website a separate password, etc? Can you even trust all banks to have the same password? Perhaps it would be safer to use a different password for each one.
By now you are looking at dozens of different passwords. Trouble is...how do you remember them all? Write them all down? Thats a big no-no. However, what if you put them in a text file and then encrypted the file? Now you only have to remember 1 thing...the decryption key, and that NEVER has to be given to anyone.
But no, I guess sarcastic mocking is funner, isn't it?
What self respecting nerd was affected by the rootkit debacle?
How about every self respecting nerd who has the decency to ensure that their close family/friends have properly functioning computers and had to waste time cleaning up the mess sony made?
Are you kidding? People notice cars stolen, but a stolen plate would be an entirely different thing (especially if they replaced it with another plate). Honestly, if the plate disappeared from my car, I'd probably go a month without noticing it (unless a cop pulled me over first).
And seriously...how hard would it be to pick and choose which car to steal it from, to make sure its the right color and model?
Are we honestly supposed to believe that 40% of the US problem can be traced to a single US
I can't speak about the Canadian figures, but as for the first part: Are you aware of the level of piracy that goes on in NYC, with so many street vendor selling bootleg DVDs? I know of no place else in the country that even begins to approach what goes on there. It seems reasonable enough to me that the source for many of those bootlegs could have been local.
I'm not saying the statistics are accurate, but I wouldn't be one bit surprised if they are.
The you must be reading the wrong credit boards, because the people that know what they are doing are just waiting on the edge of their seat for companies to not follow proper procedure for debt validation and verification. If proper procedures aren't followed, there's easy money to be had.
The problem isn't that consumers don't have appropriate protections and recourse, its that consumers aren't aware of the laws they are protected by, and then when everyone around them starts saying "your screwed...theres nothing you can do", they tend to just assume everyone is right and then they suck it up and live with the consequences.
Also, ideally research going into figuring out how to undo its runaway greenhouse effect could be put to use here on earth as well.
Isn't that kind of like saying "If we can figure out how to stop the bleeding from that severed artery, I bet we could also do something about that paper cut"?
Slashdot Mirror
That was very insightful. It was almost as if you read the summary.
One more followup. I feel dumb for never realizing this (or maybe I knew it at one point and forgot), but you can edit the channels through the mythweb interface. That would be the easiest way to delete the old channels and rename the new. Oh well.
Quick update...everything seems to work now. The season passes weren't an issue. Once I got the channel names and callsigns corrected (using mythfilldatabase with the --manual option) and then eliminated the conflict with the old channels (I could probably delete them from the DB, but I didn't want to do that just in case, so I just updated their callsigns to prefix with OLD-). All the season passes resolved automatically, so they must be tracking based on channel number and call sign rather than the internal id.
Thanks. Since my post, I already figured out how. mythfilldatabase with the --file parameter.
Only problem now is getting the channels working correctly. First they all came in with screwed up names. I corrected all the names to be like they were before, and now it appears the names are conflicting with the old channels of the same callsign, so most of the data isn't showing up. After I work that out, the last issue (I hope) is that the season passes which are set to record off a specific channel seem not to translate over to the channels because they have a different internal id.
I know you said you don't use mythtv, so it means nothing to you...just saying in case anyone else follows this thread.
First of all, the SD team includes 2 people from MythTV. But thats not important. However they want to provide the data is fine. However, there is the end fact that the same basic information has to be there. Start time, end time, date, show name, subtitle, episode description, and a few others. MythTV should have created a simple script to dump the SD data to an xmltv format that could be read by any version of xmltv. As far as I'm aware, backward compatability isn't much of an issue for xmltv. In my experience so far its degraded gracefully. However, the only solution they offer is to upgrade to a version that was just released. They don't even bother to support versions that previous release (from back in April). The only version supported was literally released a couple days before the changeover deadline.
Sorry, but when did I ever ask to get new features? In fact, I outright admitted that, yes, I am missing out on some new features but I don't care. And before you even suggest it, no I don't consider "preventing myself from losing guide data and thus having my PVR turn into a dumb digital VCR" a new feature.
They don't need to worry about the schema of my database. The version of mythfilldatabase that came with my mythtv installation knows all about the schema. All it needs is an xmltv formatted xml file.
Now, as I'm going through this process of getting things working, playing with parts of mythtv I've never seen before, and understanding how the whole process works, I'm starting to realize that its probably very possible to just download the new version of XMLTV that handles Schedules Direct data, get that to dump out the xmltv file, and feed that into mythfilldatabase. If so, that is a great solution for people with older versions. However, why couldn't the mythtv guys have announced that as another option for getting the SD data? If you go to the website, they only suggest one solution to the problem: upgrade to the 0.20.2 version.
Thanks. I just got that script setup and now have the xml file ready to go. Anyone have any pointers on exactly how to go about getting it into mythtv?
Thanks for posting this. I've been meaning to look for something like this, but have been to busy to get around to it. I really think MythTV dropped the ball a bit here. Yeah, the schedules direct thing is great, but it requires the absolute newest version of mythtv to work. I'm sorry, but my version of mythtv is 2 years old. Yes, I'm aware of the many improvements that have been made, but when it comes to recording my TV programs, I want something that is stable and tested. My mythbox has performed almost 100% flawlessly for 2 years now, and I'm content with what it offers.
I don't have time now to patch it and test it. When I build my next upgraded mythbox (probably early next year), I'll gladly pay for schedules direct. However, for now I'd rather revert to old VCR style manual scheduling than try to patch a box which I know I won't have time to rebuild if things don't go smoothly.
No they aren't. They did keep the service up for several days after the deadline, but it stopped working almost a week ago (even though my subscription is still good until the 20th). Mythfilldatabase is now saying
Resolving datadirect.webservices.zap2it.com... failed: Host not found.
The problem is that his commentary was textual with the video embedded, so when you see it directly on youtube you don't see any of that corresponding commentary (unless he posted commentary in the comments too...no way to know now, since the page is gone).
Actually, I never read the books but I got it perfectly fine before you even made this last post. And how did I get it? Well, from all the slashdotters who never tire of taking any opportunity they can to point out how the movie sucks because it left out the scouring of the shire and Tom Bombadil.
You complain about not using money for a specific cause, but would you complain about the times when they give more to a cause than they get in donations for that cause? Where the hell do you think all that money comes from.
You seem to have a misguided idea of what the concept of non-profit means. It doesn't mean they don't make a profit off of any specific activity. They are more than welcome to make huge profits of anything they do as long as those profits are used elsewhere charitably. The idea of being non-profit simply means any excess revenue isn't distributed to shareholders.
You complain about not using money for a specific cause, but would you complain about the times when they give more to a cause than they get in donations for that cause? Where the hell do you think all that money comes from.
You seem to have a misguided idea of what the concept of non-profit means. It doesn't mean they don't make a profit off of any specific activity. They are more than welcome to make huge profits of anything they do as long as those profits are used elsewhere charitably. The idea of being non-profit simply means any excess revenue isn't distributed to shareholders.
If I had to guess, I'd guess the insightful was probably for the 3rd sentence, not the first or second. I don't really need to give irrelevant anecdotes to back it up...Sony's given us enough relevant ones to prove that taking them for their word isn't a safe bet.
As for VGCharts and your comment of "looks like more than a 135% increase to me"...2 points:
1) The numbers posted now are different than what you posted, so it would seem that these stats are in flux.
2) Back in Jan/Feb, sales of the PS3 were up in the 50K range. Then the rumors came out the the PS3 was soon going to drop in price. Sales dropped down into the low 20K range and stayed there for a while. Now that the price dropped, sales jumped up. So is it really appropriate to take the lower sales that are a result of people waiting for a price drop and to use that as the baseline to see how much sales increased when they dropped the price? If so, then why doesn't sony just increase the price of the PS3 to $999,999,999.99 for 2 weeks, then drop it back to its regular price and say "wow...we incresed sales by 5000000%
Because my post wasn't addressing your specific scenario, but a general scenario instead. It might not be your personal banking password (which you use as home) that we are referring to. Instead, it might be passwords you use at the office, including internal accounts (email, accounting database, website administration), external business accounts(accounts with suppliers and other business partners, administering the retirement and health insurance plans, etc), and maybe even some personal accounts that you access on your lunch hour.
Honestly, I wouldn't believe anything I heard from Sony. If it were a sunny day and Sony told me the sky were blue, I'd probably still look up to be sure. For all we know, what they really meant was that they shipped 135% more PS3s into the retail channel in anticipation for increased sales.
Did I detect a hint of sarcasm? Well then let me explain it for you.
Suppose you signup for online banking and setup a password. Then you signup for some stupid website and use the same password. The problem is, you don't know if you can trust that 2nd site with your online banking password. They may just be phishing for passwords. Or maybe they are honest but incompetent enough to store your password in the DB in plain text, conveniently waiting there for the next hacker to locate.
The solution: Use separate passwords for the 2 sites? But then how do you start partitioning things? Do all the banking sites get the same password, your email a different password, you photo website a separate password, etc? Can you even trust all banks to have the same password? Perhaps it would be safer to use a different password for each one.
By now you are looking at dozens of different passwords. Trouble is...how do you remember them all? Write them all down? Thats a big no-no. However, what if you put them in a text file and then encrypted the file? Now you only have to remember 1 thing...the decryption key, and that NEVER has to be given to anyone.
But no, I guess sarcastic mocking is funner, isn't it?
How about every self respecting nerd who has the decency to ensure that their close family/friends have properly functioning computers and had to waste time cleaning up the mess sony made?
Thanks for the link. That website is great. So many funny songs there.
SONG #0257: THIS GIRL - I have to image the song didn't quite turn out the way the requester imagined.
I see you're an optimist.
Are you kidding? People notice cars stolen, but a stolen plate would be an entirely different thing (especially if they replaced it with another plate). Honestly, if the plate disappeared from my car, I'd probably go a month without noticing it (unless a cop pulled me over first).
And seriously...how hard would it be to pick and choose which car to steal it from, to make sure its the right color and model?
And luckily for us, the auto manufacturers only produce 1 car of each color for each model.
I can't speak about the Canadian figures, but as for the first part: Are you aware of the level of piracy that goes on in NYC, with so many street vendor selling bootleg DVDs? I know of no place else in the country that even begins to approach what goes on there. It seems reasonable enough to me that the source for many of those bootlegs could have been local.
I'm not saying the statistics are accurate, but I wouldn't be one bit surprised if they are.
The you must be reading the wrong credit boards, because the people that know what they are doing are just waiting on the edge of their seat for companies to not follow proper procedure for debt validation and verification. If proper procedures aren't followed, there's easy money to be had.
The problem isn't that consumers don't have appropriate protections and recourse, its that consumers aren't aware of the laws they are protected by, and then when everyone around them starts saying "your screwed...theres nothing you can do", they tend to just assume everyone is right and then they suck it up and live with the consequences.
Isn't that kind of like saying "If we can figure out how to stop the bleeding from that severed artery, I bet we could also do something about that paper cut"?