Hi there,
I'm happily running VDR (great software!) which is used by several
members of my family. We often encounter the problem, that we have
recordings around that nobody feels responsible for and don't
want to delete them because someone else might still want to watch them.
So from time to time we need to go through all recordings together and
decide what can be deleted. This is also a solution of course, but I came
up with another idea, that I'd like to share here as others might find
it useful too:
The basic idea is, to make it possible to set different flags on a
recording. So every member of my family gets a flag (I use single
letters) which whom he can 'flag' a recording as "I'm interested in
this, do not delete". After watching, he deletes his flag and if no more
flags are set, the recording can be removed safely. Of course you can
also flag a recording for someone else - say, if you think it might be
of interest for that person.
Now, I'm not familiar enough with the vdr code to implement something
like that, so I went for a workaround. The flags are simply noted in the
title of each recording, like so:
-ku- My Recording here the 2nd and 3rd flags are set (k and u),
I use hyphens as placeholders for unset flags
Flags can be set and unset acceptable convenient by renaming the
recording (you need the easyinput patch for that).
Of course new recordings should also contain the right set of flags. We
mostly use vdradmin to create new timers, so it's easy to quickly prefix
the title of a new timer. To also support auto timers, I made a small
patch to vdradmin, which enables you to specify a flag block that each
timer, that is create by this auto timer, is to be prefixed with. This
is a very useful addition as you can see which recordings are created by
what auto timer (no more: "Is that your recording?" "No, I don't think
so."). :-)
The patch is against vdradmin-0.96 and can be found here:
http://www.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/~jav/vdr/flagmod.vdradmin096.patch.tar.gz
I publish my home-made 'flag support' here, as others might find it useful too
and also in the hope, that someone might pick up on the idea and implement it
in a proper way someday. :-)
Regards,
Jan
