[mythtv-users] Recommendations on setting up MythVideo

[Johnny]

> I have a 1TB partition for videos on the backend - not much chance of
> changing that without a lot of viewing dropping onto the floor!! How would
> readers suggest I arrange directories on the video partition so that I can
> NFS mount it on the frontends to get direct access for ISO images but
> still put the rest of my videos into a storage group so that the metadata
> is not duplicated.

The structure you have below should be fine, since the iso and
storage_group folder are excluded from each other. I think they fixed
the duplication problem. If your video storage group and your local
frontend setup pointed to the same folder then you used to get
duplicates. But I think the behavior now is to use the storage group
if both are pointing at the same directory. You can have all of your
metadata/artwork folders pointing at the same folders for storage
groups and for the frontend setup. That won't be a problem. The
artwork for videos in storage groups will go to the storage group
folders and the artwork for local videos will go to the locally setup
folders. If they happen to be the same it isn't a problem.

> A second question revolves around jamu - how can I (if its even possible)
> scan just a couple of directories to populate the metadata for them,
> without going through all the snatches of YouTube videos, home videos etc
> in the interactive process of giving everything an ID. Would the following
> work with symbolic links that are only made after running jamu (to avoid
> the pointless queries for clips that only exist on my box)

The only way I am aware of is to assign these videos an imdb number of
99999999. You may be able to do some mysql to automatically assign
that number to any video that is in the home_vids folder.
Unfortunately I don't know much mysql, but it shouldn't be hard. As
always directly messing with the database has risks, so I would make
sure you back it up. The recommended path would be to use the python
bindings instead
(http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Python_bindings/MythVideo), but again I
don't know enough python to give you the specifics. But it should be
straightforward to set the inetref field with the python bindings.

Excluding home videos seems like a common request so being able to
exclude a whole folder would be nice and I am sure others would
welcome a solution for this.

>
> /mnt/video/iso           <- NFS mounted on all frontends
>          /home vids     <----------------- symbolic link
>          /other_junk                      |
> /mnt/video/storage_group/                  |
>                        /movies            |
>                        /music_vids        |
>                        /home_vids   <-----|