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Usage

The main purpose of myth2kodi is to processes a MythTV recording in order to generate a file name that Kodi will be able to make use of in building your media library. It can do this as a MythTV user job that you can add to your recording rules or manually, from a command line.

For a very brief overview of usage, at a command prompt run:

myth2kodi --usage

The use of myth2kodi can be broken into three categories:

  1. MythTV user job;
  2. Process a recording from the command line; and
  3. Access support functionality via command line flags.

MythTV User Job.

The MythTV user job should be called as follows:

$binpath/myth2kodi "%DIR%/%FILE%"

where $binpath is replaced by the full explicit path from myth2kodi.conf or the USER SETTINGS section of myth2kodi.

Process a Recording from the Command Line

To process a recording at the command line, the script can be called with the following form:

myth2kodi "Input File" ["show name"] ["episode name"] ["season-number" "episode-number"]

where the square brackets [] contain optional arguments. At the moment, only add season or episode number if you can add both. For any optional arguments not provided, myth2kodi will attempt to fill in missing information from the MythTV-DB and myth2kodi's local database, which is generated from TheTVDB and tvmaze. When called as a MythTV user job, the "%DIR%/%FILE%" argument is expanded by MythTV to provide the "Input File" argument. The command line equivalent would be, for example:

 myth2kodi "/home/myth/recordings/2308320472023429837.mpg"

But if we know the show and episode name we can provide them, which saves myth2kodi having to figure them out for itself, for example:

myth2kodi "/home/myth/recordings/2308320472023429837.mpg" "South Park" "Here Comes the Neighborhood"

The arguments are positional, meaning that to provided later arguments without earlier ones then you need to provide an empty argument, for example:

myth2kodi "/home/myth/recordings/4208420472023429842.mpg" "Humans" "" "2" "4"

Access support functionality via command line flags.

Once myth2kodi is installed you can get an overview of additional functionality by running:

myth2kodi --help

The first argument, beginning with --, is a command flag telling myth2kodi that it will be doing something other than processing a single recording in the usual way. The first one of these that you should make use of, as the final step of installation, is the --diagnostics flag. Running:

myth2kodi --diagnostics

causes basic tests for the presence of dependencies to be run, it also does some checks of the configuration and core functionality. Summaries of what is found are printed via the logging system (by default this means both to stderr and a file called diagnostics.log in the myth2kodi working directory).

PROBABLY SHOULD PUT A DESCRIPTION OF ALL COMMAND FLAGS HERE...

A practical example of using some of myth2kodi's command flags:

If a recording fails to process, you can look at the logs for that recording to try and get an idea of why the processing failed:

myth2kodi --log '/media/video/recordings/TVshows/1020_20151105093800.mpg'

In this case the series was recognised as 'Sherlock' but even falling through to fuzzy matching the plot against myth2kodi's episode tables for Sherlock failed to identify the correct episode (in this case the plot from the guide data stored in our MythTV-DB was just too different to those available from TheTVDB and tvmaze, we're only as good as our data). To see what information your MythTV-DB contains on the recording we use:

myth2kodi --recording-info '/media/video/recordings/TVshows/1020_20151105093800.mpg'

which, in this case returned:

MythTV-DB information for: 1020_20151105093800.mpg

Title='Sherlock'
Subtitle=''
Season=''
Episode=''
Airdate=''
Originalairdate=''
Category='Drama'
Storagegroup='TVshows'
Stars='0.0'
Description='A game of cat and mouse as a crazed bomber pits his wits again Sherlock.  Who is behind these deadly puzzles  CAST Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman'
Seriesid=''
Programid='zw0123a003s00'
Chanid='1020'
Starttime='2015-11-05 19:38:00+10:00'

As you can see, the guide data broadcast by Australian free-to-air digital tv stations can be pretty terrible. Luckily, interwebs search is a magical invention. Copying the description field into your favourite search engine quickly reveals that this is "Sherlock, Season 1, Episode 3, The Great Game", so, with this knowledge at hand, we just run:

myth2kodi  '/media/video/recordings/TVshows/1020_20151105093800.mpg' 'Sherlock' 'The Great Game'

and the recording is now processed correctly, with:

ls -l /media/video/recordings/TVshows/1020_20151105093800.mpg

returning:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 librarian users  70 Dec 17 16:07 /media/video/recordings/TVshows/1020_20151105093800.mpg -> /media/video/tv/Sherlock/Season 1/Sherlock S01E03 (The Great Game).mpg