[mythtv-users] Exciting updates to video2ipod!

[Jeff Simpson]

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