[mythtv-users] Deleting recordings after conversion

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Fri Oct 18 17:57:34 UTC 2013


On 10/18/2013 01:46 PM, George Nassas wrote:
> On 2013-10-18, at 8:49 AM, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>
>> Much better than
>
> I’d like to throw in a suggestion to use the services API:
>
> curl 
> "http://backendIP:6544/Dvr/RemoveRecorded?ChanId=$CHANID&StartTime=$STARTIME”
>
> will do the trick. You’d need a little shell date wizardry to get the 
> start time in an acceptable format but that’s about it. Two lines in a 
> shell script and you’re isolated from future myth internal changes. 
> Ask here if you need help with the start time.

That would work, too, and still uses MythTV to do all the data 
manipulation/access, so has many of the same benefits. So it, too, is 
definitely better than the direct DB manipulation.

Which means, at that point, the question becomes mainly whether it's 
easier to do the date wizardry in a shell script before calling an 
existing/already-installed program or just use a (real ;) programming 
language like Python (which requires having another script, assuming 
your user job script isn't in Python). As a matter of fact, I'm pretty 
sure that the bindings do the wizardry for us and we can just pass back 
the exact value the user job receives. Then again, if the service API 
call doesn't handle the various "MythTV" date formats (including the one 
given to user jobs), it should be fixed to allow any of them to be used 
(and automatically detect which), like the command-line tools do. Then, 
you'd only have to worry about URL-encoding the value, unless curl does 
that for you.

If I get some time, I may go ahead and show how easy it is to do a 
one-off delete script with the Python bindings, but it won't be this 
week. (I'm not posting it until I've been able to test it.)

Mike


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