pyTivo Discussion Forum

[sgtstadanko]

Hey All,

Just installed pyTivo on my linux media server and am quite impressed. I am now able to serve up all the videos on my myth box seamlessly to the Tivo. I was wondering if anyone has tried to integrate playback recorded TV function?

Basically MythTV stores files with the channelID and timestamp as the file name (for example 1158_20080920200000.mpg). All of the program info is stored in a mysql db. I can add the directory with the recordings but in the Video list all you get is the 1158_20080920200000.mpg instead of the program name. Ideally one should see the Program Name, the when it is selected the detailed episode info on the Start Transfer screen. This has been done with galleon and FUSE, but running the java app all the time eats up resources. Using MythTVFUSE, you can mount the recordings directory and FUSE calls the db and replaces the filename with program info so that the above becomes {The Venture Brothers}{1969-12-31}{My Dinner With Hatred}{10.30 PM Sun Jun 22, 2008}{TOON}{1800}{}1158_20080920200000.mpg.mpg. Galleon parses the {} and it appears with show name in now playing and shows all the details of the episode at the detailed transfer screen.

Basically I was wondering if there was a way with python to parse this info and have it presented to the Tivo? Just an idea.....

Thanks

[rdian06]

pyTivo supports metadata in .txt files. So in your example, if you had 1158_20080920200000.mpg and 1158_20080920200000.mpg.txt along side it with the metadata, then pyTivo would send the title, actors, dates, etc... over to the Tivo and you would see it in the transfer list rather than the file name.

For the format of the metadata file, see:

http://pytivo.armooo.net/wiki/MetaData

And there are some utilities already written to query online databases and generate the metadata files. If you can get Myth to generate them or adapt one of the existing scripts to read from your db and produce the metadata when the movie is written, then you'd be set.

For the utils, see:

http://pytivo.krkeegan.com/other-apps-f5.html

[wmcbrine]

But it certainly should be easy enough to parse that format, too. Um, if you would, please post some more examples, so I can have something to test with, without having to build a MythTV system.

[sgtstadanko]

awesome...these are just the kinda replies I was hoping for. Here are some more examples:

[trevorp]

Funny you should ask this. I just discovered pyTivo last week and figured it would be a great way to get my MythTV recordings on my Tivo.

I have written a php script that will do two things: First, it will look at your recordedprograms table in MythTV, and create symlinks with "friendly" names to all of your MythTV recordings. More on this below; Second, it will create pyTivo metadata files for all of the symlinked recordings with as much useful information as I saw in the MythTV database.

Though creating the symlinks is not necessary for pyTivo, as it will display the data from the metadata files, I still find it useful.

The script also runs a clean up routine at the end where it deletes symlinks to missing files, orphaned metadata files and empty directories. PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU SET YOUR DIRECTORIES CORRECTLY AT THE TOP OF THE SCRIPT. Care has been taken to only delete orphaned .txt files, however if you set your directories wrong, you can delete .txt files you didn't intend to.

Here is a small sample of what the results look like:

[sgtstadanko]

you, sir...rule.

I will give her a rip

[sgtstadanko]

work great for me. I changed the title var to $title so it shows up with the show name on now playing, but other than that all works. Now to add it as a myth job to run after recordings finished so it updates the files and soft reset pyTivo.

thanks

[trevorp]

Excellent, glad it worked. Looks like I goofed on the title part. I was playing around and forgot to put it back I guess. Glad you caught it too.

You shouldn't need to soft reset pyTivo though. I know at least for me it picks up the changes automatically.

[trevorp]

Here's a small update that includes changing the title: metadata to $title per sgtstadanko's suggestion.

Also, I added a left outer join on the ratings table to handle shows without ratings. I noticed it on Heroes, where 1 of the three episodes I have recorded has a rating, but the other two don't

[danimal4326]

what about updating pytivo video filter to query the mythtv DB directly? Use this info instead of meta files. This would work for movie files as well, as the MYTH video plugin stores IMDB data in the myth db. just a thought..

[trevorp]

Probably easy enough to do. At least for me, that would require learning python though. I'll leave that to someone who's at least seen python code to do.

I would worry that this would create a rather specialized fork of pyTivo for those of us with MythTV boxes and Tivos.

It would also be a lot more configuration for your average user, as they would have to grant access to the mysql server from the pyTivo box unless they were on the same pc.

I'm not saying don't go for it, by all means, please do! Just pointing out some observations.

[edalquist]

You can also use the mythrename.pl script which is included with MythTV.

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Mythrename.pl

You can get the script to create symlinks in a directory to all of your mythtv recordings.

I run the following to get the renaming done:
/usr/share/doc/mythtv-backend/contrib/mythrename.pl --link /filer/mythtv-nice --underscores --format "%T-%Y.%m.%d-%H.%i-%S"

[edalquist]

I am having some problems transferring files (push from pyTivo or pull from the Tivo) to my new HD Tivo.

I have MythTV setup using a HDHomeRun to record digital TV broadcasts. Myth doesn't do any transcoding, it just writes the MPEG2 TS from the DTV broadcast to disk.

Transferring the files fails with: error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer') It appears that pyTivo seems to think the files are in the appropriate format for the Tivo but I'm wondering if there is some transcoding needed?

Here is my debug logfile:

[wmcbrine]

The TiVo expects program streams, not transport streams. Unfortunately the ffmpeg check that pyTivo uses just recognizes these as MPEG-2, so it passes them.

[rdian06]

To elaborate on what wmcbrine said, the Tivo cannot handle MPEG2 Transport streams directly. Feeding a MPEG2 TS to the Tivo will cause it to reject it and close the network socket which in turn causes the stack trace at the bottom of your log.

The pyTivo transcode logic screen scrapes the ffmpeg output along with looking at the file's extension to decide whether to transcode or not. Unfortunately that logic doesn't look at the ffmpeg container format specifier currently.

If you rename your Transport Streams with a .ts ending rather than .mpg, the pyTivo logic will automatically flag that as a Transport Stream and use ffmpeg to convert it to Program Stream (vob) format on the fly for transfer to the Tivo.

Or you can create a metadata file for the mpg file that forces transcoding. If you group all your Transport Stream mpg files in a directory (or a number of directors) and drop a default.txt metadata file into the directory with the following line: