[mythtv] A simple feature request

Darryl Merritt mythtv at djm.dbme.net.au
Thu Dec 29 21:43:03 EST 2005


Background:
My Myth TV backend has a 250Gb SATAII hard drive dedicated to MythTV
recordings. It also has 750Gb of drive space (using LVM) for archiving
anything I want to keep. I set it up this way so that MythTV has pretty
much exclusive use of the drive to save the recordings.

If I want to save a recorded TV show, I will copy the recording from the
MythTV drive, tidy it up, rename, and save it away on the Media drive.

I use MythWeb to manage the MythTv backend and use XBMC on the XBox as the
front end to play back the both the saved media and MythTV recorded shows
by sharing the drives with SAMBA.
The result is that my young son can select a show that was recorded
yesterday (from MythTV) or last month (from the archive) just by selecting
a different menu item (SMB share) in XBMC.

The downside of this setup is decoding the file names that the MythTV
shows are saved as. I realise that users were not supposed to see the raw
files but MythTV is just another source of media files, not the total
solution.

I've pondered this for a while now, and the solution I have come up with
is fairly simple. In a separate folder (maybe under the folder where the
records are stored) is a symlink back to the original nuv/mpg file.
The symlink name could be based on the channel, title and start date/time
of the show.


Eg  Record 'The Simpsons' on channel 10 at 6pm on 31st Dec 2005.

The file as recorded by MythTV is  /TVShows/10_20051231180000.nuv

so in /TVShows/titles/ a soft links are created pointing to the original
saved files.

/TVShows/titles/Ch10_The_Simpsons_2005Dec31_1800.nuv ->
/TVShows/10_20051231180000.nuv

This takes up no extra disk space, doesnt change the way MythTV works and
I could then just adjust the SMB share for MythTV to point to the
/TVShows/titles directory instead of /TVShows.

As the .nuv files are created and deleted by the MythTV backend, the
symlink could be created and deleted at the same time.

This enhancement would have no effect on transcoding and commercial
cutting as this would still be done on the original file.

I'm more than happy to help test and debug this enhancement.

Cheers,
Darryl







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