Hi there,
I'm happily running VDR (great software!) which is used by several members of my family. We often encounter the problem, that we have recordings around that nobody feels responsible for and don't want to delete them because someone else might still want to watch them. So from time to time we need to go through all recordings together and decide what can be deleted. This is also a solution of course, but I came up with another idea, that I'd like to share here as others might find it useful too:
The basic idea is, to make it possible to set different flags on a recording. So every member of my family gets a flag (I use single letters) which whom he can 'flag' a recording as "I'm interested in this, do not delete". After watching, he deletes his flag and if no more flags are set, the recording can be removed safely. Of course you can also flag a recording for someone else - say, if you think it might be of interest for that person.
Now, I'm not familiar enough with the vdr code to implement something like that, so I went for a workaround. The flags are simply noted in the title of each recording, like so:
-ku- My Recording here the 2nd and 3rd flags are set (k and u), I use hyphens as placeholders for unset flags
Flags can be set and unset acceptable convenient by renaming the recording (you need the easyinput patch for that).
Of course new recordings should also contain the right set of flags. We mostly use vdradmin to create new timers, so it's easy to quickly prefix the title of a new timer. To also support auto timers, I made a small patch to vdradmin, which enables you to specify a flag block that each timer, that is create by this auto timer, is to be prefixed with. This is a very useful addition as you can see which recordings are created by what auto timer (no more: "Is that your recording?" "No, I don't think so."). :-)
The patch is against vdradmin-0.96 and can be found here:
http://www.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/~jav/vdr/flagmod.vdradmin096.patch.ta...
I publish my home-made 'flag support' here, as others might find it useful too and also in the hope, that someone might pick up on the idea and implement it in a proper way someday. :-)
Regards,
Jan