[mythtv-users] MythicalLibrarian, symlinks and Myth: Will this work or will Myth lose its mind?

[Raymond Wagner]

On 2/1/2012 13:17, Matt Emmott wrote:
> The problem (well, challenge, no offense intended) is two-fold with 
> what I want to accomplish. First, I want filenames that can be queried 
> against a tv listings database so aggregators like XBMC, Boxee and 
> Plex can index and display the episode descriptions to the end user.

As I understand it, mythicalibrarian does all this stuff internally, and 
either populates XBMC's database directly, or provides metadata files 
XBMC understands.

> but the issue would still be that they are stored in the Myth-esque 
> naming convention, so if I connected via Samba etc, I couldn't easily 
> see which file is which episode.

As you mention below, you could use mythlink.pl to create links to the 
files, but there is good reason to using a generic naming system for 
storage.  First, it ensures a unique filename in the event the metadata 
is similar, such as two movies of the same name.  Second, it means you 
don't have to deal with all those little filesystem quirks, such as 
limited character sets and limited name length.  If you screw up the 
symlinks, who cares.  You patch the code for that particular issue and 
continue on.  If you screw up a file rename, or overwrite something, the 
data may simply be gone.  That's the reason renaming capability was 
removed from the old mythrename.pl (to make mythlink.pl).

> I've used Mythlink.pl in the past to periodically sweep through and 
> set up symlinks TO my recordings, and then pointed my aggregators to 
> its "show_names" folder. Unfortunately, I end up with a huge flat 
> directory of vague filenames based purely on show and recorded date.

MythVideo has a mechanism where instead of viewing your content based 
off the underlying directory structure, it will generate one of several 
other structures based off the stored metadata.  Does XBMC have anything 
of that sort?  With mythicalibrarian automatically pulling such data fro 
XBMC, that could be an option.