MythTV recorded shows into the TV Shows library database

dteirney Wrote:I've posted similar comments/questions on what I have found to be the most active MythTV front end thread for XBMC at http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=2297&page=47.

I think I might have burnt my question allocation there though. Been posting quite a bit of late...

Is there anywhere else that you think I could post?

No you misunderstod me, I meant that you might have to turn to the MythTV back-end developers (over at http://www.mythtv.org) to ask them if they can expose the season and episode information on their side, (I did not mean that you should request this from XBMC's MythTV front-end developers in a other topic-thread on our forum).

Gamester17 Wrote:No you misunderstod me, I meant that you might have to turn to the MythTV back-end developers (over at http://www.mythtv.org) to ask them if they can expose the season and episode information on their side, (I did not mean that you should request this from XBMC's MythTV front-end developers in a other topic-thread on our forum).

Right, whoops. Wasn't sure that was necessary as the information appears to already be in the MythTV database in the Recorded Program table.

I've done some more digging though and XBMC appears to use the CMyth API which is probably using the Query Recordings command via the Myth Protocol. It's all starting to make a bit more sense now.

It doesn't appear we are going to get episode and season numbers in our XMLTV data feed in New Zealand for the EPG though, so exposing them via the Myth Protocol won't help

That Query Recordings API appears to support the original air date though. That combined with the series name might be enough to scrape something like theTVDB to get any additional information to push the recording into the TV Shows library as suggested by someone else (almost certainly not possible at theTVDB at the moment - and may never be).

The original air date isn't currently being exposed by the CMyth Program struct used by libcmyth.dll which I'm guessing the myth:// protocol is using directly. After looking at my latest XMLTV file there are no date entries filled in, so it doesn't look hopeful we will get the original air date either...

Unless there is a direct mapping between the data held in the MythTV database and what the XBMC TV Shows Library expects then it might not even be possible to scrape anywhere to get any additional information needed (at least with the sparse New Zealand XMLTV data).

Might spend more time looking at this when I'm back from leave at the end of June.

If anyone can point me to a definition of the data fields needed for the TV Shows library in XBMC that would be a great start.

It would also be useful if a movie was recorded that it show up in the Movies library rather than TV Shows Library.

Not sure there is anything in the XMLTV feed to identify something as being a movie. Perhaps something rule like if the recording was longer than 90 minutes then it was treated as a movie would work

In the meantime a cool alternative would be to do something similar to what the PS3 does which is have the shows selectable by title, genre and date. This could be another menu under "Recordings".

If I knew how to code I would take a look myself, but unfortunately shell scripting is about my limit.

Regards,
Hitman

I think mythrename.pl and mythnuv2mkv.pl might be of help here.

As far as I could get was using mythrename.pl to convert show names to include the title, subtitle and original airdate. I think with that and the chunks of the script that author specifies in comments here http://web.aanet.com.au/auric/?q=node/6 will rename the shows again with S##E##. Which is where I'm stuck.

Anybody else work something out with that?

Airtime is available at the moment in the cmyth api. (added it soon after myth updated their docs on the protocol). But we currently don't have any scrapers that can use it so it's not really usefull right now.

elupus, just making sure that you saw Gamester17's post about thetvdb.com now adding airdate to their api. Good times!

Bit of a resurrection from the dead, but this has come up in a number of forum posts recently.

For the record there is a Trac ticket that deals with adding content to the TV Show library using the original air date. http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/7197

Did you also follow your original idea to make the content of mythtv database available to xbmc without scraping from an online source? I am looking for a functionality like that as a fallback mechanism when my favorite scraper won't find any information (what happens quite often for non-US movies or tv shows). Is there anybody working on something like this?

Maybe I will try to play around with it but I am very new to all this (xbmc and mythtv) and don't know anything about scrapers. Would it be possible to export metadata from mythtv database as an xml file and then use the scraper mechanism to get this information into xbmc database?

regards,
malte

malte Wrote:Did you also follow your original idea to make the content of mythtv database available to xbmc without scraping from an online source? I am looking for a functionality like that as a fallback mechanism when my favorite scraper won't find any information (what happens quite often for non-US movies or tv shows). Is there anybody working on something like this?

Maybe I will try to play around with it but I am very new to all this (xbmc and mythtv) and don't know anything about scrapers. Would it be possible to export metadata from mythtv database as an xml file and then use the scraper mechanism to get this information into xbmc database?

regards,
malte

Not yet, but it's on my list. Time left over for coding at the moment is short given it's now summer here in New Zealand.

There are some other options that may not require the TV Shows to be scraped into the XBMC database since the myth:// source already populates all of the VideoInfoTag information that it can. If I get one of the other developer suggestions to work I'll add the information on how to the MythTV wiki page.