Program Guide Filtering of Junk Shows

[Pumpkinhead]

Regarding the thread I started in this thread whether this was already possible with an existing customization or not:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21651

How involved would it be to add that type of filtering in the program guide so that certain series will never show, such as "paid programming," "will n grace', "grey's anatomy" and all the other stuff I NEVER want to watch and would rather not have cluttering up my program guide? I want blank spots there instead. In fact, there are probably 100 or more series I would like to "disappear" from my program guide for ever.

Note - Excluding by genre or channel doesn't do the trick. I need to do it by the series and/or name that appears in the program guide.

I've read over the Sage Studio guide, but I'm still lost how to tackle this in a general sense or how difficult it will be. Any ideas?

[stanger89]

Let me ask you this, what would you put in place of those shows? Blanks? Nulls? If you filter out a series, it will leave "gaps", empty timeslots in the guide.

As for how involved, filtering out channels, or timeslots would not be too hard, but filtering shows would be much more difficult I think. However it should be similar to how a genre is filtered.

[Pumpkinhead]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Let me ask you this, what would you put in place of those shows? Blanks? Nulls? If you filter out a series, it will leave "gaps", empty timeslots in the guide.

Right, blanks as mentioned in my first post, much easier to see & not overlook any new golden nuggets that might appear without all that "junk text" in there.

Originally Posted by stanger89

As for how involved, filtering out channels, or timeslots would not be too hard, but filtering shows would be much more difficult I think. However it should be similar to how a genre is filtered.

I can't seem to filter by anything in the program guide, but only in the extra "guides", but not the main program guide. (Using ver 4.) Is there any filtering in the main "program guide" in any of the other customizations?

[GKusnick]

For someone familiar with Studio, the SageTV API, and programming and data structuring concepts in general, I don't think this would be too difficult. It's primarily a matter of filtering the list of airings fed to the TableComponent widget that generates the cells. There are several ways to do this filtering, depending on how you want to structure your list of excluded shows. A secondary issue would be providing some sort of UI for creating that exclusion list (which can be as simple as using Notepad to edit a text file).

However if you've never done any sort of programming before, then you have a pretty steep learning curve ahead of you before you can tackle something like this. If you have no long-term aspirations to become a Studio wizard, and your only interest in learning Studio is to implement this particular feature, then it would probably be more efficient for someone else to do the coding rather than walking you step-by-step through the process of doing it yourself.

One way to find out where you fall on that spectrum might be to work through the turorial exercises in the Studio manual and see if what you learn there makes sense to you and gives you the glimmering of an idea of how to proceed.

[Pumpkinhead]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

For someone familiar with Studio, the SageTV API, and programming and data structuring concepts in general, I don't think this would be too difficult.

Thanks for the response. I've read the manual with some understanding, no "real" familiararity with it. It was all new to me.

I've got no long-term aspirations to be a Studio wizard. My interest was purely in trying to implement this feature. There are already add-ins/features for about everything else I've thought of. I've had some programming experience with a few different languages many years ago, but mostly just minor scripting stuff of late.

I'm sure you are right that it would be more efficient if someone else did the coding, but apparently there hasn't been enough demand for anyone to justify taking the time to do it. So that's why I decided to look into it myself. I've had SageTV for 2 years, but this only got to be more of an interest for me when I purchased more programming recently. Even after removing the channels I dont want, there's still a lot more to sort through.

I'm debating whether I want to invest the time on the tutorials at this point if I'm still going to be biting off more than I can chew.

[Pumpkinhead]

It's been about 3 years since I first asked about this. Did anything ever get developed that would allow this functionality?

[GKusnick]

Not that I'm aware of, but you could try looking through the Downloads section to be sure.

My guess is that if you haven't been motivated to do anything about it in three years, then it's unlikely anyone else has.

[Pumpkinhead]

Ahhh.... but everyone was as motivated to do this as I am, we wouldn't have ANY Sage stv's, imports, add-ons.

Also, from the past comments, it sounded like a lot more of an undertaking than I was prepared to take. I'm not a programmer by trade or hobby, although I do have some experience.