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

[Matt Emmott]

On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 1:35 PM, Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com> wrote:

>
> As I understand it, mythicalibrarian does all this stuff internally, and
> either populates XBMC's database directly, or provides metadata files
> XBMC understands.
>
> Not true, at least in my limited experience. ML has a function where it
can notify XBMC (As well as your desktop, I believe) when a new recording
is available, but AFAIK that's the most "pushing" it does. After recording
and exporting an episode of Family Guy, for example, it creates the
following path under my recordings directory:

/Episodes/Family Guy/Season 8\Family Guy S08E03 (Spies Reminiscent of
Us).mpg

I pointed my Boxee Box and my Plex Media Server to that folder, and each
app used its respective metadata lookup to display the episode and plot
synopsis.




> > 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'm sure that the Unix admins out there will look at the above naming
structure and all of its spaces & capitalization and weep quietly into
their ThinkGeek coffee mugs, so I completely understand why Myth should
keep its native naming convention.

>
> 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.
>
>
I'm by no means neither a dev nor an expert in XBMC etc... I'd consider
myself maybe a power user at best, so I don't want to speak for them.  But
it sounds to me that if MythArchive (or something similar) could make the
file and folder hierarchy based on the above conventions I spelled out,
that would be all we would need for the aggregators at large to index the
content successfully. And if I may step on my soapbox a bit, this could be
a HUGE step towards solidifying MythTV as a central hub for everything from
XBMC to Roku to Xbox 360 to all those smart TVs that are out there these
days... You lose the functionality of a true front end, but you gain the
ease of pointing a $100 box to an SMB share and having access to all your
recordings. Just a thought from an end user :-)
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