[azrael17]

I've been thinking about the seasonal/holiday channel conundrum that several people have mentioned and all the workarounds people have posted. I thought of two possible solutions going forward:

1) Expanding the best effort scheduling capability to include a monthly setting, where you could insert a hidden channel into a regular channel for an entire month, or

2) Have some kind of month-based toggle which could switch a hidden channel into an unhidden channel for a specific month.

I'm not sure how this would work and whether the change in status would crash PTVL or whether it would simply take effect on the next restart or channel reset, but I thought it might be useful to share the idea.

Have briefly discussed this with luna.

if there is a better list out there he may be able to autotune a holiday chan.

ie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ha...n_specials

Can you clarify what you mean by he needs a better list? I know that I formed my personal list from local sources using a smart playlist and a plot description tag. The crux of the problem is how to add that playlist to PTVL on a seasonal basis.

How would the autotune work? Would it match against a specified list and any from that list that exist in the person's library would be added to the channel? Or does he need some kind of list of actual video sources (ie: Youtube)? If so, I can probably help put together a playlist, but that doesn't seem to solve the main issue as most people who have posted about holiday channels so far have been focused on local sources.

Personally I like the idea of hidden/unhidden channels. They would appear only during a specified month and would be hidden for the rest. It would be a clean option in the guide and would still allow people to control the content of their channel (through playlists, genre tags, plot tags, etc). I just don't know if it will mess things up because it will cause a change to the EPG (it would have to only take effect after a restart or a reset).