Hi,
Firstly, TVServer is fantastic... finally I can get rid of my old ropey mythtb setup, and have a proper client-server pvr system, with a great windows client.
One thing I want to do though is automatically transcode my recordings to H264 (for iPod), and provide an rss feed to the transcoded recordings, with all the metadata present and correct. This way, I can subscribe to the RSS feed in iTunes, and all TVServer recordings will appear automatically in the podcast section, which will sync onto my ipod.
I have this working at the moment with mythtv (using a bunch of hacked together c# programs, and bash scripts), but I want this feature on TVServer.
Im planning on writing a TVServerHooks plugin, which just provides a simple GUI setup screen, to allow you to run external programs on TVServer events (like recording started, recording finished etc). I am planning on having an option to output the metadata (eg, program title, channel, series info etc) to a .xml file, a .ini file, and by setting environemtal variables, that way, you could cobble together a script, or a exe etc to process the file.
I would then probably write a simple batch file to actually call mencoder / ffmepg to encode to ipod.
Once this is working, I would improve my batch file to a c# program, which maintains a list of 'outstanding' transcodings in a file / table, and ticks them off as they are successfully transcoded (in case there is a power cut or something during the transcode).
A completely alternative way of doing this would be to use the server API in a standalone program to ask mediaportal for recent recordings, and to process them at that point (say scheduled at night). The problem here is 'knowing' which files have already been processed. Ideally there would be a place in your database that I can record my metadata (ie, recording X has been transcoded OK). Failing that, I could just use a .ini file to record the IDs of records already successfully processed.
At the moment I am favouring the second option. However, if someone has already done this, im wasting my time!
so:
My questions to the community are
1. Is there already a way to do this (ie, transcode to format X and provide the metadata)
2. Does this sound sensible / useful?
3. Is there a designated place in your database to store extra meta-data (eg transcode status) against recordings? whats your policy on new tables, I was thinking of something like
create table RecordingMetaData
(
RecordingID int (or whatever u use for PK),
NameSpace varchar
TagName varchar
TagValue varchar
)
Then I would insert (and check for) records in RecordingMetaData with a namespace unique to me (eg IPodTranscoder), and a tagname for the data type (eg TranscodeComplete) and the TagValue for the value (eg True == transcode happened)
cheers
George
Firstly, TVServer is fantastic... finally I can get rid of my old ropey mythtb setup, and have a proper client-server pvr system, with a great windows client.
One thing I want to do though is automatically transcode my recordings to H264 (for iPod), and provide an rss feed to the transcoded recordings, with all the metadata present and correct. This way, I can subscribe to the RSS feed in iTunes, and all TVServer recordings will appear automatically in the podcast section, which will sync onto my ipod.
I have this working at the moment with mythtv (using a bunch of hacked together c# programs, and bash scripts), but I want this feature on TVServer.
Im planning on writing a TVServerHooks plugin, which just provides a simple GUI setup screen, to allow you to run external programs on TVServer events (like recording started, recording finished etc). I am planning on having an option to output the metadata (eg, program title, channel, series info etc) to a .xml file, a .ini file, and by setting environemtal variables, that way, you could cobble together a script, or a exe etc to process the file.
I would then probably write a simple batch file to actually call mencoder / ffmepg to encode to ipod.
Once this is working, I would improve my batch file to a c# program, which maintains a list of 'outstanding' transcodings in a file / table, and ticks them off as they are successfully transcoded (in case there is a power cut or something during the transcode).
A completely alternative way of doing this would be to use the server API in a standalone program to ask mediaportal for recent recordings, and to process them at that point (say scheduled at night). The problem here is 'knowing' which files have already been processed. Ideally there would be a place in your database that I can record my metadata (ie, recording X has been transcoded OK). Failing that, I could just use a .ini file to record the IDs of records already successfully processed.
At the moment I am favouring the second option. However, if someone has already done this, im wasting my time!
so:
My questions to the community are
1. Is there already a way to do this (ie, transcode to format X and provide the metadata)
2. Does this sound sensible / useful?
3. Is there a designated place in your database to store extra meta-data (eg transcode status) against recordings? whats your policy on new tables, I was thinking of something like
create table RecordingMetaData
(
RecordingID int (or whatever u use for PK),
NameSpace varchar
TagName varchar
TagValue varchar
)
Then I would insert (and check for) records in RecordingMetaData with a namespace unique to me (eg IPodTranscoder), and a tagname for the data type (eg TranscodeComplete) and the TagValue for the value (eg True == transcode happened)
cheers
George