MythNetTV

Using MythNetTV to subscribe to Videocasts

There is a utility for MythTV called MythNetTV which can be found at [1]. This utility does a great job at grabbing videos from an RSS feed and importing them in to MythTV's database as recorded programs. Set up is quite simple in LinuxMCE but is done via the command line.

• Login to a shell as linuxmce
• Switch to a suitable directory. We'll just use /home/linuxmce
• wget http://www.stillhq.com/mythtv/mythnettv/source/release-5/mythnettv-release-5.tgz
• tar -xzvf mythnettv-release-5.tgz
• cd mythnettv5-release
• sudo apt-get install python-feedparser
• sudo apt-get install python-ctypes
• sudo apt-get install python-mysqldb
• sudo apt-get install mencoder
• mkdir data

Subscribe to Shows

• ./mythnettv subscribe "URL" "Title of Show"

For example, if you want to subscribe to Tekzilla you would issue:

./mythnettv subscribe "http://revision3.com/tekzilla/feed/quicktime-large?subshow=false" "Tekzilla"

Repeat that step for any shows that you want to subscribe to

Get your shows and import them

• ./mythnettv update
• ./mythnettv download 1

(the number that follows "download" is how many of each show MythNetTV should download and import)

That's all there is to it.... The shows you subscribed to will now appear in LinuxMCE's Video category as well as in your MythTV Front Ends

Automating the process

In your mythnettv directory you can create a script that will automate this process and then add that to cron to automate the process.

• touch get-shows
• chmod +x get-shows
• nano get-shows

When editting the get-shows script, just add the following lines:

cd /home/linuxmce/mythnettv-release-5/
./mythnettv update
./mythnettv download 1

Press Ctrl-X to save the file and then test it:

• ./get-shows

Now you can add it to cron so that it will be run automagically every day

• cd /etc/cron.daily
• sudo ln -s /home/linuxmce/mythnettv-release-5/get-shows mythnettv