[mythtv-users] How to put MythVideo storage groups back in?

[Robert McNamara]

On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 8:29 AM, Steven Adeff <adeffs.mythtv at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 11:26 AM, Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com> wrote:
>> On 5/23/2011 11:15, Neil Bird wrote:
>>>     So a while back, as I still needed to use external apps. to play some
>>> videos, I disabled the use of video storage groups.  I'd now like to
>>> re-enable them, as I think Myth is successfully playing everything I can
>>> throw at it, and I'd like to see if I can get MythWeb videos working
>>> (“MythWeb now requires use of the Videos Storage Group”).
>>
>> MythWeb Videos is really broken.  Switching to storage groups will not
>> fix it.  It simply needs to be rewritten to use the proper backend
>> protocol calls.
>>
>>>     And the biggest question, I suppose:  will a rescan afterwards keep all
>>> my metadata (presuming I get the directories correct)?
>>
>> Since 0.23, all content in MythVideo is hashed.  If you rename it, or
>> change directories, or migrate from local folders to storage groups, it
>> doesn't matter.  So long as that video exists somewhere in the paths
>> defined for scanning, MythVideo will find it and update the location.
>
> I recently did what your asking about and can verify Raymond's
> comment. As far as I can tell, in the database the filename is stored
> separately from the location of the file. I created storage group
> locations for my videos then removed the location in the frontend
> settings so that Myth was using the storage groups (or at least to
> make sure?). upon restarting the frontend all my videos were visible,
> playable, and contained all the metadata they did before.

Note that unless you rescanned, you are still playing the files
locally.  The local/SG settings only pertain to the video scan, and
determine where to look for files and what information to insert into
the database.  What Raymond is saying is that once you do everything
you did above, and then rescan, the database records will be updated
to reflect their locations in storage groups.  Here's the basic logic
flow:

You scan for videos.  Is the video storage group defined?  If so, get
a list of the contents of all those directories.  If not, get a list
of all the files in the local video storage dirs.  Now look at each
file.  Does the host + path + filename appear in the database?  If
yes, ignore and move on.  If no, hash the file to get its unique
identifier.  Does the hash exist in the database?  If yes, then update
the host and filename values with the new ones, leaving the other
metadata intact.

Basically, even with the settings changed, Myth will go on playing
your files for as long as it can get at them-- but to actually update
the database, you need to rescan.

Robert