Hello all,
Well it's been about a year since I started trying to work on the
airtime codebase and last e-mailed this list. But I've been busy as I'm
sure all of you have. I did manage to get the first change implemented
which now allows Smart Blocks to be sorted based upon multiple criteria
such as Newest and Oldest vs. simply random.
I'm not 100% sure if that is the most intuitive way of of labeling it as
perhaps it could be expanded to another drop down that would allow them
to choose which date field it sorts bysuch as most recently played. As
of right now I believe it is coded to base it on utime or uploaded time.
The next modification we could use is something that allows the Real
Time generation of Smart Blocks vs. the creation when they are dragged
into the schedule.
I know this isn't where most of the development efforts have been
focused but until we get something like this in place my station won't
be viably able to switch to using airtime as our automation system
because we would need to manually build our schedules every day and we
don't have the dedicated labor to ensure this.
Here's what Albert said in response to this earlier.
"Off the top of my head, you could start by trying to disabling the
generation of smart block contents when you insert a smart block into a
show. Then, make the code insert a smart block into cc_schedule instead of
just files. When the block is to be played out, then trigger the generation."
I'm going to highlight my understanding of how things work currently and
provide an opportunity for anyone to correct any misunderstandings I
have or answer the questions I have.
So the way Airtime works is there are Shows - these are repeatable on
various criteria and they can be linkable so that they produce the same
content each time they air.
I notice that some process is filling out cc_show_instances but this
doesn't happen indefinitely but happens for the current month and/or for
the next month. This has caused some errors in the past where I've had
the linked show contents simply disappear and new content not be added.
I noticed that when you browse to the next month it triggers code to
fill in cc_show_instances.
There are possibly still a few bugs in the code that handles the
repeating of linked shows. There is also no way to set the repeating of
shows to be relative to month say for instance this show airs every 2nd
and 4th saturday. Which I've ran into when using airtime.
The other issue is sometimes the linked contents don't make it over. And
the shows are empty. This requires a manual intervention of cancelling
the current show. Creating a new show that starts in the future and then
filling it with whatever content and fixing the newly linked shows. This
has been better than in the past but we have still had a few instances
where the playlist comes up as blank and I've had to go in and fill it
up. This is annoying but the workaround is easy enough for our current
use case.
Can anyone point me to the code that handles the generation of
cc_show_instances and determines what shows repeat etc ?
Here is what I'd like to see modified.
Make dynamic playlists or smart blocks generate at a set time before
playback. This could be another option per show.
What I'd like to is for Shows to have a default Playlist option as an
alternative to linked static content. The playlist could include a
number of dynamic smart blocks that would be generated before playback
as opposed to when they are dragged into the item.
I'm trying to figure out how shows are actually scheduled and what I
would need to modify to do this and if there is any consensus on how
this could be done. I'm not interested in having my station run a forked
instance of Airtime if I do the development work as that would just
cause more headaches in the future. So I really would like to come up
with a solution that could be merged into the existing codebase.
I'm guessing the code is in here private function
retrieveMediaFiles($id, $type) in Scheduler.php where it calls
getListOfFilesUnderLimit from Block.php
I'm figuring that I'd need to modify this function to make it do this at
a later date. Then I would need to figure out a way to again trigger the
creation of these automatically and store the dynamic playlist in the
database and then build cc_schedule at some point prior. I'm not sure if
another table would need to be created or if how cc_show_instance could
be changed to simply not generate this until demanded.
Do we push the files to Pypo and liquidsoap via RabbitMQ ? I haven't
looked much past the PHP code and I haven't wanted to implement a custom
liquid soap script to handle some of this as people have shown examples
for how to do in the forum.
I'm sorry that this e-mail is a little convoluted and I'm sure you are
all busy but if someone has time to point me in the right direction I'm
going to continue to work on this as I have time.
Thanks,
Robb