[mythtv-users] exporting several TV show recordings to be imported into another back-end

[James Abernathy]

On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 12:06 PM Lists via mythtv-users <
mythtv-users at mythtv.org> wrote:

> Since you don’t want to transcode them, could you not set up a script to
> do the following
>
> 1. Scan the records in the “recordings” table on your old mythconverg
> database
> 2. Copy the file in the retrieved record from your old backend storage to
> your new backend storage location
> 3 inject the data from the old database record into the new database
> 4. Use mythutil to rebuild the seek table for the transferred file.
> 5. Possibly some other housekeeping tasks.
>
> Caveat: I do not know if you would also need to update any other tables in
> the database for this to be effective maybe try it manually on a single
> record+recording first to see how the new backend deals with it.
>
> Maybe one of the devs, with more knowledge of the database can give more
> advice on this suggestion?
>
> Good luck,
> Dave.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
>
I think most of these steps are above my pay grade.

What I tried over the last few minutes was to time how long it would take
using my sendTVtoNAS.sh UserJob.

Using the web app, I can go to the Recording tab and click the menu for
each recording and select sendTVtoNAS. That take < 3 second per recording.
So I can do a whole season of 20 episodes in one minute.  At that point the
backend has a queue of 20 jobs to run.  It's about 2x speed, so about 20
minutes per recording. But at the end I have in my video directory all the
recordings where the title has all the relevant information i.e.

'Major Crimes - s3e5 - Do Not Disturb.m4v'

When I move these .m4v files to my new backend videos storage group
directory, running "mythutil --scanvideos" find them and populates all the
TVdb metadata.

This will take many hours, but only a few minutes of my time.  Since the
old backend is not doing any new recordings, I can let it run 24/7 for a
few days.

This may be the easiest method for me since I have the sendTVtoNAS script
running already.  I just don't need the compression/transcoding.

Jim A
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