[mythtv-users] home videos

[Vincent McIntyre]

The recent question about "school me on playing vids in myth"
reminded me of a question I've had for some time; (how) do people
use myth to view home-generated video, from a video camera etc.?

There's been relatively little discussion of this [1], I'd like to put together
some suggestions as an addition to the wiki page [2].

Just off the cuff, it seems like the workflow would be
 * (one-time) set up video storage groups (a separate group?)
 * (possibly) transcode to a supported format
 * upload files to the directories named in the storage group
 * retitle files if necessary
 * generate keyframes, eg
     ffmpeg -y -i INPUTFILENAME -vframes 1 -ss 00:00:10 -s 320x240 OUTPUT.png
   and upload to (screenshots? coverart? fanart?)
 * scan
 * view

It would be nice to provide some metadata, as well. The requirements seem
to be different though:
 * the filename may not necessarily be the 'title' you want to use for
the item [3]
 * you probably want the exact date, not just the year
 * you may want to add tags: things like location, event name (eg
birthday party),
   people depicted, who shot the video, etc.
   A lot of this could be handled with a 'Description' field.
Some container formats allow this (eg EXIF tags), some don't. It doesn't seem
like myth has much support for metadata tags like this, but I haven't checked
carefully.

I haven't tried any of this, I'm just thinking about it a bit first.
Comments? Experiences?

Cheers
Vince

[1]
 http://www.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/2011-April/313565.html
 http://www.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/2010-January/278144.html
 http://www.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/2006-May/136050.html
 http://www.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/2003-December/022912.html

[2]
 http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Video_Library

[3]
 http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MythVideo_File_Parsing