[mythtv-users] What can we expect in 0.23?

[Michael T. Dean]

On 11/02/2009 07:42 PM, Robert McNamara wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 5:38 PM, David Hunter wrote:
>   
>> One feature I would like to see is proper naming (Ie human readable)
>> file naming of mythtv recordings. Similar to the WMC filemame
>> convention, or is there already a way to do this?
> Please don't top post on this list.
>
> Yes, you can use the mythrename script.

Though doing so will likely cause issues.  
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Mythrename.pl

In truth, Myth is /already/ doing the right thing by naming the 
recordings using only Arabic numerals, the underscore, period, and "mpg" 
or "nuv".  When you use human-readable names, you end up with the 
problems of dealing with a) characters that are illegal in filenames on 
some file systems/platforms, b) characters that are not present in the 
character encoding used by the file system's filenames, c) file names 
that are too long for filenames on some file systems/platforms, d) 
disagreement on how the "broken" filenames were corrected to 
file-system-usable filenames in various different parts of the code 
(i.e. Myth libs, Perl bindings, Python bindings, ...) and/or redundant 
coding of the same rules which must always be kept up-to-date, and e) 
many more issues...

So, use mythrename.pl --link (which will /never/ cause issues--the 
--link argument is critical) and get the best of all 5 worlds:

  1) recording filenames that /always/ work no matter what
  2) human-readable filenames that can be used when reading files 
directly off the file system (and that if "broken" can usually still be 
recognized by a human)
  3) a directory that contains /only/ information about recording files 
(i.e. no PNG preview pixmaps, etc.)
  4) the recordings from /all/ directories in /all/ local storage groups 
are /all/ visible in the same location (meaning you don't have to hunt 
down recording files across multiple different directories/file systems)
  5) as many different views as you want each named/sorted differently.

(There may be other worlds that I'm forgetting.  I'm intentionally not 
mentioning the world I care most about, "makes it less likely for users 
to mess with Myth's data," since many will disagree with me about who 
owns the data.)

Mike