(2013-07-06, 06:48)Kanpai Wrote: Hello everyone. I have a particular channel setup i'd like to create, and i've scratched my brain trying to see if it's possible with the tools I have, including geebs' excellent modified rules.py, but I'm not sure I can do it.
Basically I have show-specific bumps, which i want to sometimes air in front of their series counterparts. So for shows A B C D E, and corresponding bumps BA BB BC BD BE, it might look like
B
C
E
BD
D
C
C
BA
A
D
BD
D
BE
E
It can't play bumps every time, because I don't have that many, they'd run too often. That seems to be the rub, as i currently interleave a bump per episode on a single series hidden channel, then interleave 2 episodes of that (a bump and an actual episode) into the real channel, for each series. Having the bumps interleave less frequently in the hidden channels means sometimes bumps appear after episodes and sometimes they appear by themselves. Thanks for any help or insight anyone can provide into this problem.
As an aside, I got some of my bumps from www.bumpworthy.com, mentioned by another user earlier in the thread as unrecognizable by PseudoTV. This is true - pseudotv's mp4 parser returns a duration of 0 for these files. I had other mp4s that played fine, so i compared them and found that the bumps had headers at the end of the file vs. the beginning. This is my best guess as to the problem, I can't debug any further as I don't speak python. Instead of transcoding them to avi like the other user I remuxed them to mkv as a workaround, in case others also have this problem.
If I am understanding you correctly, your set up is very similar to what I wanted to do, and the reason I edited the rules file. Hopefully I can help you get ti sorted out with just the changes I added if possible (gotta be honest, I would love it if other people found use for my edits as well [hooray for being useful!])
So, just to be clear (and redundant, heh), you want a channel that includes several series, some of which you wish to air with a show specific "intro"-bumps? But you don't want them to have the "intro"-bump every time that show airs?
So sometimes you get a bump, and sometimes you don't sort of thing? Hmmm. That will take some thinking and experimenting on. The randomization is really what would cause the problem, depending on how many other channels are being interleaved into the main channel, and what order they are in. (Also, as a sidenote just in case, if you are interleaving a 1:1 bump/series channel and then interleaving those by 2' into another channel, make sure you set the starting episode back to 1 each time. I've forgotten on occasion and caused myself a great deal of confusion.) Being able to interleave multiple episodes at a time also means having to account for each of those as well with every interleave rule you pass after that. I have had to get out the ol' paper and pencil and start mapping out channels to make sure they come out right before digging in with xbmc to do it lately.
Could you make a smart play list that includes the all the episodes of the shows, randomize that, then use it as a base channel. Then take the bump/show channels you already have and interleave those into your base by 2's? Still not sure of exact mapping order for randomization without futzing up any previous interleave rules though. Or if that is what you are looking for at all. I will do some tests on my system and see how that sort of thing works out.
I've done something similar with a couple channels, but I put them on a strict schedule. I wanted to recreate the old Toonami 1.0 block. But I also wanted specific bumps for each series. I ALSO wanted the bumps to be season specific (greedy, I know.), series to run from start to end, the programming block to only air on weekday afternoons on my Cartoon Network channel from 4-7pm, and show a Friday night movie in the block as well. This meant doing some fancy interleaving (and best effort scheduling). So if you have a question for how to interleave something I might have an answer somewhere in the rats nest of interleaving I have on my testing system. I am currently testing for a Saturday morning cartoon, Disney Afternoon, Snick, and Adult swim blocks, so it won't be much of a problem to test out some other scenarios. I am already planning on working on it for a good chunk of today. Just let me know if what I surmised from your post was correct, or if I got everything wrong and am just a big, fat, dumb dumb.
I am also finding the XBMC GUI to be increasingly cumbersome to use for generating channels this complex, and I honestly don't think PseudoTV manager is being developed in any way anymore. It kinda suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks, hehe. I've been playing around with the Json API lately too, and I am kinda curious if I can use it to create a more elegant management tool for PseudoTV.