[agentgonzo]

If that feature is genuinely important to someone, a further option is to use XBMC Gotham, which still included the cmyth addon. In fact, IIRC, cmyth was even included in Helix until the late beta stages.

It seems to me that there are many options available to have a good working frontend.

I think everyone agrees there are "options" (although, having to rollback to Gotham just to get a watched flag set seems like a rather drastic solution -- as does having to migrate to Myth 0.28).

The point of my post was to point out that pvr.mythtv for Helix is not "working fine" in all cases -- which is a completely different topic than what options are available to mitigate the problem.

Are we only allowed to discuss problems in here that have zero resolution options?

Agreed. Watched status is a very important feature. Administering a mythtv backend is enough of a nightmare as it is without having to run an unstable version, so I would not regard 'use 0.28' as a solution to that problem. And I've just updated to Helix; rolling back to Gotham is not an easy or practical thing to do when everything is installed from packages. So while there might be options to get this working correctly, none of them are reasonable for someone who just wants a stable system that works.

Would it be very hard to make the watched status work in the new mythtv addon with mythtv 0.27?

Unfortunately I fear that making the watched status work in the new mythtv addon with mythtv 0.27 wouldn't be easy (given the lack of responses for a plugin that 'works' with 0.27 on helix). The underlying cause is that the development of the mythpvr addon changed between gotham and helix in two ways:
1) The new way that kodi/xbmc communicates with the addon itself (which means you can't use old gotham pvr addons in helix)
2) The way that the mythpvr addon communicates with the myth backend itself.

In the old cmyth addon (gotham), the addon communicated directly with the myth database (SQL) and updated it directly as necessary (to mark things as watched).
The new myth addon (helix) does not communicate directly with the database, but instead uses the new Services API in myth. As of 0.27.4, there is no API (commuincation mechanism) to update the watched status of a recorded show. This has only been implemented in 0.28 (hence the need to update your backend).
The 'old' code that communicated directly with the SQL database has been removed from the (helix) myth addon code, so in order to make the addon 'work' with a 0.27 backend and mark shows as watched, janbar would need to re-add all the code that communicates directly with the database just to implement this one feature - then when 0.28 is released, remove this database code again as it would be unnecessary. Asking Janbar to do this as well as all the good work he/she (?) is doing would be unfair given the excellent work already done on the addon.

It's a shame but I don't see a particularly simple solution (and I'm a bit puzzled as to why this API wasn't implemented as part of the 0.27 branches as it's a fairly obvious and important API from my point of view).


Technical: I had thought about running a small python shim that acts as the 0.28 services API for marking the show as watched that communicates directly with the SQL database to mark a show as watched, then having apache act as a reverse proxy to split 'true' calls to the services API from this one call to the UpdateRecordedWatchedStatus, but that may be a bit more work than I'd care to undertake, and just updating to 0.28 may be easier :-(