Post by Tony HardingPost by Captain InfinityOnce Upon A Time,
Post by Johny B GoodUnfortunately, the BBC's series and episodes numbering are pretty well
meaningless outside of the BBC itself. The episode production codes I've
appended have an unambiguous worldwide meaning which will be much more
useful in this NG.
But not nearly as useful as the episode titles, because those are written
in intelligible English, whereas the production codes are written in
meaningless combinations of letters and numbers and require you to have a
database at your fingertips in order to decode them.
I beg to differ, the production codes tell us much without any database
at all, namely the central alpha part, "ACX", designates the Family Guy
show, the numeric prefix tells us the season and the also numeric suffix
tells us the sequence of that show within the season, noting that this
is not the broadcast sequence. What is doesn't reveal is the episode's
title (which would be nice, of course; but it's subject to revision,
whereas the existing production code is not, i.e., 9ACX13 will always be
9ACX13[1].
Tony
1. The alpha piece for Futurama is "ACV", and the episodes are
designated like FG, e.g., 1ACV01, 1ACV02, ... 9ACV11, ETC.
I was going to reply to the critique but I couldn't be arsed to argue the
"Bleedin' Obvious"(tm), expecting someone else to chip in. I didn't
realise I would have to wait so long for such a supporting reply to
arrive. ;-)
I suppose I _aught_ to have responded to the:-
"and require you to have a database at your fingertips in order to decode
them." statement with the obvious one that such a resource is available on
the internet to anyone who cares to search.
Ever since I acquired my first DVB-T tuner adapter for my PC, some 6
years back, I've been recording TV shows of interest to _me_ onto computer
hard drives (note; NOT using a "PVR") so using a meaningful file naming
convention for these files is of considerable importance.
I let the scheduled (and the occasional non-scheduled) recordings rely on
the automated naming mechanism of the TV recording software which is
simply based on the date and time to the nearest second of the start of
the recording.
The recordings only receive a meaningful name with the essential post
recording processing required to clean up the on-the-fly TS to PS
converted MPG stream files and to top and tail the padding (and, in the
case of Channel Four's broadcasts of the "The Simpsons", slice and dice
and recombine to eliminate the commercials).
Although I could find the episode names for The Simpsons episodes from
the Andrew Flegg website (bleb.org) if I was arsed enough to sully my eyes
with a commercial broadcaster's program listing, I don't. I simply leave
the laptop to record the 5 episodes a week output from Channel Four and
discover the names of as many as the 20 or 30 episodes recorded over the
past 4 to 6 weeks and simply rename them with the product code before
saving them as raw files ready to be used as replacements to any previous
episodes that Channel Four had damaged.
What I've noticed with Channel Four's "The Simpsons" playout strategy is
their sly way of watering down the new (to the UK) episodes with endless
repeats from earlier seasons mixed in amongst the new. In some cases, I've
collected as many as 4 repeats of previously recorded episodes. Most
repeats are still only at the 2 or 3 mark.
The importance of the production codes in this context is that they
provide unique filenames for each episode (with obvious single letter
extensions to differentiate the repeats) which I might, one day, get
around to appending episode titles to.
By the time the BBC started to broadcast the Family Guy and the American
Dad! series, I had started to add their published titles to the production
code based naming convention I had already established with the "The
Simpsons" recordings whenever possible. If I left it more than a day
before processing the raw files, I couldn't check the bleb.org listings
for such information since it didn't go back further than the previous day.
I think, initially, I simply waited for the inevitable repeat to come
round and then chose the least vandalised broadcast version as a keeper to
be saved with the full episode title as the last part of the filename, eg
"Family Guy 1ACX01 Death Has a Shadow.mpg" for the very first episode.
Eventually, the penny finally dropped that I could search the internet on
phrases such as "Family Guy episode listings" and find such databases
which allowed me to fill in any blanks,
not only for cartoon series but also for a lot of drama series as well.
The naming convention I use for non-cartoon series is based on the
following convention:-
series name n-n 20110908 episode name(if applicable or even available)
eg "New Tricks 10-10 20110905 Tiger Tiger.mpg" or "HIGN4U 7-9 20081208
David Mitchell.mpg"
The first example is self explanatory but the second might only be
obvious to a UK fan of the very long running "Have I Got News For You"
series. I thought a web search might fail on the "HIGN4U" part but it
seems to only be the BBC who are incapable of imagination as displayed
with their reference of #HIGNFY (presumably a web search term) that's
shown at the end of the intro sequence to each episode in their recent
series.
I usually use abbreviation for series names when it turns out that the
individual episode names display a tendency to excessive wordiness. In the
case of cartoon series such as Family guy and American Dad!, the
production code replaces the episode "number - total episodes and date
time digits" part of the name used with non-cartoon series since it
provides a unique identifier key (and the actual broadcast date does not
have the importance it normally has with other material). Also, such key
identification is embedded within the end credits of each cartoon episode,
a feature that is, afaict, totally absent in all other genres.
Assuming the broadcaster doesn't vandalise or truncate the end credit
sequence, it's possible to identify each episode from the broadcast itself
without reliance on a proposed schedule listing which can occasionally be
subject to changes made at the broadcaster's whim.
IOW, as a unique identifier key, you couldn't do any better than to use
the production code itself.
--
Regards JB Good