[mythtv] Programme icons

[Robert McNamara]

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Andreas Benneke <ab at beansoft.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've recently setup my MythTV and am still exploring the amazing
> possibilities... :-)
>
> As a subsriber to the xmltv-data from epgdata.com I saw, that they are
> providing icons for the programs as well (not to mix with the channel
> icons). And now I would love to see those nice eye candy images in mythweb,
> etc.. as well... ;-)
>

Yes, those are quite nice, there are some comparable services here in
the US with program images too which may ultimately find their way
into Myth by way of Schedules Direct.

> I figured, that the xmltv format already allows optional <icon>s for each
> <programme>, but I could not find any matching fields in my mythconverg
> database. Am I missing anything?

No, you're not missing anything, these are not presently used.

>
> Is mythfilldatabase doing anything with the <icon> information of a
> <programme>? I could not find anything looking into the source...?
>
> If this information is ignored so far, are there any ideas how to get the
> icon information into the database?
>

If I were going to do it, I'd probably suggest something like a new
table (recordimages) that references SeriesID, and has a thumbnail
field.  Since Myth now supports fanart, banner, and coverart, you'd
probably also want those in there too.  So, more or less, for the show
LOST, a record might go something like:


SeriesID           |     Thumb     |     Fanart     |     Banner     |
    Coverfile     |
EP00672362     |lostthumb.jpg|   lostfan.jpg  |   lostban.jpg |
lostcov.jpg     |

Then you'd need to write a function to pull the image filenames out of
the DB for each SeriesID, and on each screen where they're presented,
associate them with a MythUIImage for display.  The reason I would do
it this way is so you only end up downloading the image for a given
program *once* instead of every time.  You'd also want to think
carefully about which images you download because almost nobody would
want them downloaded for every show in their DB (we're talking about
thousands for most north american users).

That's the very very simplified version of how I'd probably do it,
which ignores making it work with storage groups, etc. It also ignores
the harder part of getting the actual images downloaded and into the
right spot (meaning probably writing some image download stuff into
mythfilldatabase, or even better, generalizing file download in the
backend so that it can be used across the board by things like
MythVideo, or for running the TVDB grabber to get
fanart/banner/coverfile at the same time), and probably streaming them
from a storage group.

Robert