[mythtv-users] MythVideo Cover Art and MythWeb

[Joseph A. Caputo]

On Thursday 11 March 2004 15:37, Eric Hammersley wrote:
> Mythtv 0.14
>
> This should be simple but I've spent enough time trying to figure it
> out myself.
>
> What has to be done in order to get the cover art from a ripped DVD
> present in MythVideo to show in the MythVideo web page on MythWeb? 
> From within the frontend under MythVideo the cover art is present and
> displays correctly.
>
> I've looked at the php source, the README's and searched the archive
> to no avail.  It's pulling the cover art location straight from the
> SQL table so I thought permissions.  Well that doesn't seem to help
> either. I even moved it into image_cache under mythweb and 777'd it
> to see, still no luck.
>
> One thing that puzzled me was that it didn't appear to be setup
> completely in config/conf.php  But maybe I'm wrong.
>
> 	// Path to the mythvideo "covers" directory
>         define('video_img_path', ''); <-is that right?
>
> I'm afraid I don't know much about PHP but I tried adding a hard path
> to the line above but it didn't help.
>
> Any ideas would be appreciated.  Aside from my LIRC problems (like
> some others) this is all I can't figure out.


Is your web server running on the same machine where your cover art is 
located?

Regardless, MythWeb needs to have the ability to run on *any* webserver, 
which may not be the same as one of your Myth boxen.  Therefore, the 
cover art would need to be handled as a RemoteFileTransfer, the way the 
recorded preview images are done.  However there's a glitch -- the 
mythvideo cover art is not guaranteed to be on the same machine as the 
backend, either, because MythVideo is currently a frontend-only plugin; 
i.e., the video storage directory indicates a path on the frontend 
where MythVideo is being run.  Neither MythWeb nor the master backend 
has any way of knowing which frontend the cover art is on, and even if 
it did, would not have any way of fetching it.

This is all worst-case scenario, of course... the problem becomes 
relatively trivial on a single frontend/backend system with the 
webserver on the same box, or even for multiple frontends/backends/
webserver with common NFS or Samba-mounted storage.  Unfortunately it 
doesn't suffice to only write code for the simplest case.

I believe this is why the feature hasn't been implemented...

At some point, whenever Thor's mfd code is ready for general release, 
MythWeb, MythVIdeo, MythMusic & MythGallery should be able to be 
rewritten to take advantage of Myth-served content & metadata.

-JAC