[mythtv-users] Myth2Go - Reqeust for help

[Stephen Boddy]

On Monday 29 May 2006 13:58, Yan Seiner wrote:
> This is the process so far:
>
> 1.  Pull all available movies and recordings from the home database.
> 2.  Build a dialog-like interface for deciding what movies and
> recordings to take.
> 3.  Insert the data for those movies and recordings into the carputer
> database.
> 4.  rsync those movies and recordings to the carputer.
>
> (Since the carputer never records anything on its own, I don't have to
> worry about syncing the two databases, I just yank-and-stuff.)
>
> I could really use some help with 1.  I've looked at the database, and I
> *think* I've identified what needs to be pulled, but I am not sure how
> recordings work at all and what I need to pull from the database.

I've wished there was a nice big diagram that showed the structure, and what 
field in table A relates to a field in table B. I think there's some 
documentation on the wiki, but it is exactly that - documentation. I can read 
a doc, but 9 times out of ten, I need to whiteboard it to fully grok it.

> Also, 
> any suggestions for a scripting language with good MySQL support would
> be welcome.  I've used PHP a bit, but only in CGI apps, so I'm not sure
> how useful it would be here....  And I am useless at Perl.

Well the perl'ers will probably start beating me up here, but I'd recommend 
Python. Very easy to learn (less than a day for the basics), OO, clear syntax 
(for readability, understandability etc.), has a nice simple interface to 
MySQL, and has a lot of very well documented modules that will do most things 
you want, included by default at installation. Also comes with a tutorial 
that'll get you productive in very short order. There's also a superb IDE for 
it called Eric (project management, refactoring, debugging, QT GUI building, 
unit testing, syntax highlighting, code browsing and so on.)

If you're curious about Python take a look at the mythautoicon stuff I've 
written. It also accesses the DB, so it'll give you an idea.
http://www.syzygy.eclipse.co.uk/mythalsig.html
In there I do SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE on the mythconverg DB.

At the end of the day it depends though. If you are comfortable and productive 
with PHP, then that would be the way to go.
-- 
Steve Boddy