[mythtv-users] mythvideo: where is "always play next" in mythconverg?

[Christopher X. Candreva]

On Sat, 26 Jan 2008, Gísli Óttarsson wrote:

> I wanted to create a chain of "animated shorts" in mythvideo but found that
> selecting the video to play next by stepping alphabetically through over
> 1000 titles is very painful.

I had the same problem. I wrote some scripts to automate the process, but 
then found the built in playlist has some problems of it's own. For one 
thing, it is very difficult to stop playing. Once you've made a list, ESC 
seems to abort the current video and play the next one, aborting the whole 
list seems to be hit or miss. 

I ended up setting up a rule to call mplayer for .pls files, reading them as 
a playlist, and making plain-text playlist filaed named '00 - Play All.pls"
This way I have the best of both worlds, can play the playlist and step 
forwards/back through the list, or play individual episodes. The only way it 
could be better would be if mplayer didn't clear the screen between videos 
in the list.

If you want to try my scripts to do it the with the database playlists, I've 
uploaded them to http://www.westnet.com/~chris/Mythtv   Be warned -- these 
were hacks to do what I needed to do, not intended as released programs.

mklist.pl expects the name of a text file containing the list of files, in 
order, to make a list from. ie:  mklist.pl  ./Movies.txt
Will read the files to make into a list from Movies.txt
It expects all the movies to already be in the database.

lookup.pl lets you bulk lookup movies on IMDB an insert their data into the 
database. You give it all the files on the command line. You will need to 
edit the path to your poster directory at the top of the file.  Call it as

   lookup.pl  Psycho.avi "The Spy Who Loved Me.avi" 
or just   lookup.pl *.avi

  It does some processing of files to remove episode numbers from the front 
(for my nameing scheme).  So if you pass it as a file name
"01 Baseball Bugs.avi"  it will look up just "Baseball Bugs" as the name.


==========================================================
Chris Candreva  -- chris at westnet.com -- (914) 948-3162
WestNet Internet Services of Westchester
http://www.westnet.com/