[skarragallagher]

Hi,

One of the things I miss the most coming from WMC, is the Original air date field.

I have requested this from the guys that develop serverWMC but they said that Kodi doesn't support this. It would be great if it did and if you were able to sort by original air date as well

[gt2690b]

+1

would love to see this too

[fishersman]

+2 I use media portal as my backend with schedules direct for my listings. They do provide the date in the plot summary. It is either stated New: and the date or first aired: and the date. It also places in database a field called original air date. This can't be pulled from what I can tell. Cobination of Kodi and the addon for mediaportal as far as I can tell. I'd like a seperate entry, but at least I can still see it.

[metaron]

There is already partial support for this in PVR in limited form (in Jarvis that is).
PVR Recordings have an 'iYear' field, which can be used to identify the year of 1st release for movies / first airing for TV shows.

If populated, it gets included in the filename (after title/episode name) so that at least movie remakes can be identified individually.
If you sort recordings by 'filename' this will sort movies of the same name into production order date, but I guess this isn't really what you wanted it for.

It was introduced originally to help get better matching with ttvdb/tmdb, but I've found that at least my listings provider (UK radio times at the time) prefers the information on imdb, which often varies slightly. Also for TV shows 'original air date' sometimes means 'in the world' sometimes means 'in this country' sometimes 'on this channel' and sometimes 'since 2 seconds before the recording started'. That's when it is populated at all by the listings provider.

For TV shows season/episode seems to be much more use for sorting purposes - and this certainly works if you record a full series, even if some of them are recorded out of sequence (at least with a mythtv backend and some special SQL on the server to re-format the data like I use). Again sort by 'filename' to get your episodes in 'season/episode' order. (Again from Jarvis onwards, if supported by your pvr client, backend and listings provider...)

Q1) Are people just interested in seeing 'original air date' in the electronic programme guide? (imho this probably wouldn't warrant a change to Kodi core, just appending the info to the description if it isn't already done by your pvr client of choice)

Q2) is this a request to have a 'sort by original air date' for recordings, i.e. so you can sort 'old' movies from 'new' ones?

Q3) If it is a 'sort recordings by original air date' request, is 'year only' (like we have now) likely to be good enough, or would month/day really be necessary as well. (i.e. something needing a PVR API change as well as a new sort option)

As an alternative, are you aware that you can now use pvr:// as a source for the video database in Kodi? (Works from late versions of Helix onwards, but better in Jarvis due to the addition of season/episode).
Once you have scanned your recordings into the main video database and 'tweaked' any incorrect matches, you then have access to all the 'original air date' information you could possibly want, provided by ttvdb/tmdb. There are all sorts of sorting options available to you then. Maybe this would suit your purposes better?

[fishersman]

Thanks for the detailed response. I use Kodi for PVR only. It is replacing WMC. We watch it, then erase it. I think there are a lot of others that are doing the same thing. We are used to seeing, not only from WMC, but my cable companies DVR a separate entry by itself highlighted for Original Air Date. It is not used for sorting, at least by me, but mainly to tell at a glance whether it is a rerun or something you missed. I have never trusted software to decide whether it is a rerun or not. I set Kodi up originally to use the scrapers and libraries but it really is overkill if your just using Kodi for PVR and not collecting whole seasons and things. I have gone and modified the skin I use to highlight the stuff I want to see and use. I have figured out ways to display limited fanart without using the scrapers and library functions. I am retired and I have had a lot of fun learning the code and stuff in my free time. Currently, I can go in and do ListItem.whatever and get pretty much anything I really need, but original air date is not one of them. Like I stated above, mediaportal with Schedules Direct has a field in their EPG database for original air date, but not the database where it stores the recordings. It also doesn't include it in the episode XML that is left with the recording. Luckily, Schedules Direct includes the info in the plot so I am getting it, but I'd love to be able to display it separately like WMC and my cable company does, just for the sake of familiarity and appearance. If I understand the coding and function, to do this, Mediaportal would have to store it in the recording DB and Kodi would need to be able to query it. I would also like to be able to query it from The EPG DB for the Timer schedule and the actual EPG listing. Not a big deal, but I have to say this really has been a lot of fun and I like the improvements Jarvis is giving us