[mythtv-users] Exciting updates to video2ipod!

[Matt S.]

On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 12:15 PM, Jeff Simpson <jeffsimpson at alum.wpi.edu> wrote:
> I have some exciting things in the works for video2ipod!
>
> New Features:
> - File naming template is now a customizable perl function. You can
> (easily) make it remove spaces, replace spaces with underscores, or
> use any combination of channel ID, starttime, title, subtitle, etc in
> your filenames. You could even have it be per-program (so periodical
> news shows use one format and episodes use another).
> - Volume scaling - since the iPod does much better with high-volume
> recordings (I hate having to max out volume and plug my ears to hear
> things on the plane)
> - Myth re-inserting. This is cool. When properly configured,
> MythFrontend CAN PLAY the mp4 files generated by my script. You can
> have the script copy the transcoded file back into the myth storage
> directory and correct the name in the database to point to the new
> file. The old file is moved away or deleted to save space. Moved to a
> backup directory is probably best for now, especially if you are doing
> commercial flagging.
> - XML generation! yes, it now can generate a snippet of XML for each
> recording, for use in ipod feeds.
>
> NOW - before you all jump to download it, I should warn you - it's not
> finished yet, and it's not available for download yet (but very soon,
> once I work out configuration and usability stuff).
>
> I wanted to poll interested people to see if I could get some
> information on how I should go about these changes. There are about a
> million ways to go about doing RSS feeds, and I wanted to cater to
> what people are likely to use.
>
> My first thought is to generate an XML file snippet with each
> transcoded file and save them into some directory. Another script
> could pull all those snippets into a feed quite easily. So this
> prompts a few questions:
>  - Should the files be copied out of the storage directory to some
> other location for feeding?
>  - Should the xml files be saved in any particular location?
>  - Should it be "one big feed", or should it be more than one? One per
> type of show, maybe?
>  - What should the RSS tags be? Channel Name, Title, and Subtitle are
> all included - what should they contain? Should title be a combination
> of title and subtitle, or just the title?
>  - I think most things will be configurable anyway, but I'd like to
> have a good default setup.
>
> Please email me directly if you have an interest in this script - I'm
> going to put together a small mailing list of interested people so
> that I can stop spamming the MythTV list to get people's opinions on
> things like that.
>
> Thanks, and I look forward to your suggestions!
>
> http://wiki.jeffornot.com/wiki/video2ipod
>
>  - Jeff

Jeff, sounds like you've been hard at work.  I haven't used this in a
long time, might take a look again.  However, I'm really trying to
stay away from custom scripts and plugins as much as possible.  Any
thoughts into getting this functionality integrated into myth itself?

Thanks!
Matt