[mythtv-users] Migrating recordings from <= 0.27 to 31

[Dave Ulrick]

Thanks, all, for the input...good food for thought!

Regarding file transfer, I can use a USB hard drive tray to expedite the 
copying of the recordings to the new PC. FYI, the new PC has just one 
SSD so although it has room for a spinning hard drive I don't really 
want to weigh it down with that.

Thanks to Stephen's advice, I was able to get the mythvidexport2.py 
script to run. Unfortunately, it errors out. Not being a Python expert 
(Perl is my specialty), I'm not going to take the trouble to 
troubleshoot this. (FYI, mythvidexport2.py is identified on its download 
page as being for v31.)

Rather than go to the trouble of a full recording-to-video conversion or 
a database migration, here's what I have in mind:

The old MythTV backend has a links directory that's automatically 
updated with mythlink.pl. I propose to copy the recording files and the 
links to the new PC and redo the links to point to the correct file path 
for the new PC. The links will be placed inside a directory in the new 
backend's Videos storage group. The idea is that the Watch Videos 
interface will show the user-friendly names of the link files. The link 
names include the series name and episode title which should be enough 
information for selecting the desired video. Just now I tested this 
solution using a v31 backend & frontend. It's a bit ugly in that there's 
no thumbnail for the recording but the link name is displayed and the 
recordings play back OK.

Dave