FAQ: What's this dev slice
How is the dev slice different:-
- The dev slice is a guide data slice that is manufactured in a different manner to the traditional slice. Essentially the data is abstracted through a database layer.
- Information is firstly fed into a mysql database. This information can come from multiple sources (the more sources, the more reliable)including future manual entry.
- The information in the database is separated into 'programmes' data and 'shows' data. This allows either an individual programme episode or the entire show data to be augmented.
- At import there are a set of automatic baseline augmenting processes that run over the data which try to devine useful information. This uses both tvtome and the imdb to varying levels of success.
- The dev slice is built daily from the database, therefore any information that is added to the database will become available in the next days slice. This is shipped to the orac emulators at build completion, the entire process takes around 45 minutes.
And what does it mean so far...
- The dev system has been up and running now or a few weeks with automated operation each morning (a cron'ed singular process). The system seems stable, and barring any faults, will not change much in the next couple of months (time issue).
- The next big leap is the creation of facilities to work with the database. There is no manual augmentation at this point (except for a couple of tests in the shows data), but a web interface is in development.
- As mentioned, the dev slice is a daily slice, therefore tivos are always kept 'topped up' with data, usually +5-6 days. (Tivo's natural daily call should keep things relatively up to date)
- The dev slice separates group and genre information so that, for example, movies are flagged in the movies group and can be selected by group from the remote contol. Genres are applied where they can be devined automatically (and can be augmented manually later).
- The dev slice does not need a nonag, an additional 'source' is used to populate an empty channel for some additional days.
- The dev slice uses the database to automatically determine whether shows are episodic or not. Therefore, regularly repeating shows will almost always be available as season passes. [A noted side effect of this so far is that the first episode of a new series will cannot be season passed as the system hasn't learned its episodic yet... it is intended that these occurences can be manually updated through the systems web interface]
- Actor and director information is devined from the database as best as possible and inserted into the correct spots in the slice. So the tivo will see this information.
- Where practical (on a few channels/occasions) episode data is extracted and added to the slice... but this will be where the web system should really bring some value.
- The dev slice contains all of the available data at this stage which includes pay per view channels.
