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

[James Abernathy]

On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 1:14 PM Stephen Worthington <
stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:

> On Wed, 20 May 2026 10:41:08 -0400, you wrote:
>
> >The wiki has a lot of old ideas about exporting videos but not sure if
> they
> >are the way to go with V36.
> >
> >My desire is to move one year of episodes that are still on an old dormant
> >v36 back-end to my new v36 back-end. The old back-end is still running but
> >not recording anything new. I would like to hold on to the season/episode
> >numbers and maybe the subtitle if possible. The old recordings do have a
> >cut list/commercial flags, etc. but it's not critical to preserve them. I
> >don't want to take the processing time to transcode these. Just keeping
> >them in their MPEG2 .TS file format is fine.
> >
> >My plan B is to use a script I use as a UserJob to cut the commercials,
> >transcode to h264 and store is the Storage Group Videos, but that seems
> >overkill for this effort.
> >
> >Ideas??
> >
> >Jim A
>
> If you are wanting to export and import recordings rather than videos,
> I do that all the time using mythexport/mythimport.  Mythexport uses a
> background job that looks for export jobs queued in a database table.
> When it sees a new recording in the queue, it dumps the SQL data for
> the recording to a .sql file in a designated location and copies the
> recording file there also.  The location can be any normal path name,
> including network paths or a USB stick or an external hard drive. Jobs
> are added to the queue using PHP code in Apache2.  You use a browser
> to access the page <my web server>/mythexport and it produces a list
> of all your recordings to select from.  At the other end, you just put
> the exported recording files and SQL files in a directory of that
> MythTV box and run mythimport in that directory.  I am still running
> v35 and it is working there, but I have not tested it on v36 yet.  If
> the recording tables have not changed between versions, it will work
> in v36.  If there are changes, it is usually pretty easy to just add
> some new field names to the exported fields list.
>
> The recording data is all copied, but if the two boxes do not agree on
> what the chanid values are for the channels, the wrong channel name
> may be displayed, or a #<chanid> number if there is no matching
> channel.  You do get the full seektable data and commercial flagging
> data.  I think cut lists will also be copied as they are stored in the
> seektable, but as I do not use cut lists, I can not confirm that.  The
> recordedid values are specific to a MythTV instance, so they are not
> preserved and new recordedid values are created on the new box.
>
> Let me know if you want to try mythexport/mythimport and I will put
> all the required files in an archive on my web server.  The version
> already there is a bit out of date.  I use Ubuntu so the systemd file
> use to run mythexport is specific to Ubuntu, but should be able to be
> adapted to other distros.  You do need to have Apache2, PHP, Perl and
> Python 3 installed and the MythTV support modules for Perl and Python.
>
> For doing mass copying of recordings, I also have a utility mythsgu
> that will copy all recordings in a directory to another MythTV box
> where you can then run mythimport on them, rather than using
> mythexport.  It is a bit broken at the moment as it uses a Python
> library that has been removed from the latest versions of Python, so
> you have to install an older Python version and run it with that.
> Which is all a bit tricky to set up, so is not recommended at the
> moment.
>
>
Thanks for the explanation.  I'm more convinced to just use my sendTVtoNAS
script.

It uses mythtranscode to honor the cutlist and output to a temp file.  Then
it uses handbrake-cli to transcode the temp file to mv4 with a high quality
setting and creates the filename with the title, subtitle, and
season/episode numbers concatenated. Mythutil --scanvideo does a good job
pulling in the TVdb info.

I watch this all using Leanfront.  From a user point of view, a recorded TV
program and Video work about the same.

Jim A
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