[mythtv-users] ensuring mythbackend will be idle for db optimize

[Jerome Yuzyk]

On Tuesday, September 22, 2015 07:52:35 PM Stephen Worthington wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Sep 2015 12:48:42 -0600, you wrote:
>
> ...
> avoid times when recording is happening.  I already have a crude way
> of doing this in my balance_storage.sh script, by parsing the output
> of the mythtv-status command, so that balance_storage.sh will stop if
> the next recording is within 5 minutes (or if there is a recording in
> progress).  Feel free to borrow any code you like from it:
> 
>   http://www.jsw.gen.nz/mythtv/balance_storage.sh
> 
> So I could just do the same, and have the optimise script wait 15
> minutes whenever it sees a recording running or scheduled in less than
> 15 minutes.  That should work, but there is likely now a much better
> way of getting the time of the next recording directly from
> mythbackend using the Services API or Python bindings.  When I find
> the time, I intend to start learning about the Services API, which
> seems to be where the new work is going now.

There's a super-easy example at https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Upcoming_Parse.pl that I have modified to just pick the first upcoming recording and compare its timestamp to now. The API requires XML parsing but there are plenty of ways to do that.