[mythtv-users] Generating better recording filenames

[Michael T. Dean]

On 04/21/2008 10:01 AM, Andrew Gallatin wrote:
> Michael T. Dean [mtdean at thirdcontact.com] wrote:
>   
>> On 04/20/2008 01:26 PM, daniel åkerud wrote:
>>     
>>> I wanted to share my recording with other units on the network, and 
>>> since the upnp support has been very shaky for me I had to come up 
>>> with another solution. What I do now is have a script run that gets 
>>> all the recordings from the database and generates links with good 
>>> names that point to the recordings.
>>>       
>> Sounds like you recreated mythrename.pl --link.
> Does anybody know why the MythTV recording filenames have to be so
> darned cryptic?

Because those are not your files.  If you want access to without using 
MythTV, use mythrename --link to create a "user-friendly" view of the files.

>   Other systems have no problems using meaningful
> filenames. For example, SageTV recorded last week's My Name is Earl
> as:
>
> /var/media/tv/MyNameIsEarl-NoHeadsandaDuffelBag-100810-0.mpg
>
> They do something like
>
> filename=$series_name - $episode_name - $databaseid - $segment.mpg
>
> That way, it is easy to look up in the database, and it is
> also easy to identify by browsing the filesystem.
>
> This is one area where MythTV could be a little more user friendly...

Search the lists for all the posts about broken MythTV systems that 
result after users run mythrename.pl (without --link).  There are all 
sorts of issues, many of which exist outside MythTV and in the system 
configuration, that would come into play when using localized filenames 
that include "human-readable" information.

Also, making the files themselves easier to access makes it more likely 
that users would break their systems by managing the files directly 
(without going through MythTV).  I'll just delete this file.  Hmmm.  
This filename has a stupid underscore character where the apostrophes 
are supposed to be, so I'll fix it.

And many other reasons.

Besides, who says that a name that's friendly to you is friendly to 
everyone else.  Everyone would want their own filename formats--which is 
the /entire/ point of mythrename.pl --link...  I can just imagine all 
the people complaining that the format should be user-modifiable.  (I 
don't want the start time, I want the original airdate, can't we just 
add a setting...  Rinse and repeat a million times--each complaining 
about something different.)

Is it really so hard to run mythrename.pl --link?  I have my system run 
it 5 times every 30 minutes to create 5 different views of the 
recordings (sorted by start time/title, title/start time, recording 
group/title, category/title, title/original airdate).  It's as easy as 
setting up the attached script to run at 1/31 after the hour (or 
2/32--to quickly catch those shows that start at +1 or +2 minutes after 
the hour).

Mike
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: mythlink.sh
Url: http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20080421/9abfd55b/attachment-0001.diff