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

[James Abernathy]

On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 3:46 PM James Abernathy <jfabernathy at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> 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
>
>
Well this was a surprise.  I was playing with my recordings and videos and
for the first time using the Web App I clicked on the download button on
one of my Recorded TV programs and I received into my Downloads folder the
.TS file but it had the Title, subtitle, and season/episode number all
concatenated as the filename.  This file could now be moved to my video
directory on the new backend.

This accomplishes what my script did without the transcoding.  So much
quicker.
Still needed to run mythutil --scanvideos on the backend to make it
available in the Watch Videos.

Jim A
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20260521/14deb545/attachment.htm>