[mythtv-users] MythIpTv Beta 1

[Michael Still]

Hi.

I've been recently wanting a video blog aggregator which integrates with
MythTV. Specifically, I wanted the videos to appear as recordings. I've
had a horrible script for that for a few months, but ended up cleaning
it up when it occurred to me that Akimbo (http://www.akimbo.com) is just
a per user RSS feed, and something a lot like MythTV.

So, I wrote MythIpTv. It takes RSS feeds, imports the entries in the
feed and builds a TODO list. It then downloads shows and imports them
into the MythTV recordings menu.

The code has only been tested by me, so if you're interested in giving
it a try, please take good backups. You can find the code here:
http://www.stillhq.com/mythtv/mythiptv/source/beta-1/mythiptv

Before use, you need to make a temporary data directory in your current
working directory:

mkdir data

You use mythiptv like this:

./mythiptv --url <url to RSS feed> <show title>

or

./mythiptv --file <RSS file on local disk> <show title>

I've been using Google Video to test this, as the AVI format they use is
natively supported by the MythTV player. This isn't true for a lot of
RSS feeds and transcoding isn't implemented yet, so if you want
something to test with, you might want to use the same command line as me:

./mythiptv --url
"http://video.google.com/videofeed?type=search&q=engedu&so=1&num=20&output=rss"
"Goole EngEdu"

That command just builds a TODO list. You then need to download some of
the shows. You do that like this:

./mythiptv --download <number of shows to download>

Once downloaded, the shows will appear in the recordings menu.

I would be really interested in people's comments on the code, and
suggestions for improvement. There are a couple of things I know about
already:

 - it really needs transcoding
 - the is no graphical UI yet

Cheers,
Mikal