I thought this was a bit of a hokey solution, so I asked around if there was a script that allowed you to rename MythTV recordings (to a more human readable version), move them to another location and remove them from the MythTV database. There were some solutions out there, but they all involved the recorded files being kept in the MythTV database.

So, I wrote my own script. This script renames the MythTV files to a nice human understandable version using mythrename.pl, it then moves the recordings to a folder of your choice (in my case a mounted samba share on my server), it then uses myth.find_orphans.pl to delete the moved recordings from the mythTV database (I don’t know if it will still remember that these files were previously recorded so it doesn’t rerecord them or not, I guess time will tell).

So, without further ado, here is the script, in lovely Bash (the script is called mythtvremodel (mythtv REname MOve DELete, geddit?):


#! /bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: mythtvremodel
# Required-Start:    $local_fs $syslog $remote_fs dbus
# Required-Stop:     $local_fs $syslog $remote_fs
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: rename, move delete recordings
### END INIT INFO
# script to rename files recorded from mythtv and then to move them and delete them
#made by prupert.co.uk
#creative commons licence, whichever is the most FREE (as in beer)

#lets put in some variables so others can use this
#location of log file, you can choose anything and any name
log=/path/to/mythtvremodel.log
#this is the full path to mythrename.pl
mrename=/location/to/mythrename.pl
#this is the full path to your recordings folder
record=/var/www/mythweb/data/recordings/
#this is the extension your recordings are stored as, usually mpg or nuv
ext=mpg
#this is the full path to where you want your files moved to
dest=/path/to/folder/to/move/recordings/to/
#this is the full path to myth.find_orphans.pl
morphan=/path/to/myth.find_orphans.pl
#mythtv database password for myth.find_orphans.pl
pass=yourmythtvdatabasepassword

# first, run mythtvrename to get nice names for the recordings
echo starting mythtvremodel on `date "+%m/%d/%y %l:%M:%S %p"` > $log
perl $mrename --underscores --format %T-%S-%d%m%y >> $log
# use find to search for all recorded files in the recording folder and move them to the TV folder
find "$record" -name "*.$ext" >> $log
find "$record" -name "*.$ext" -exec mv {} "$dest" \; >> $log
# use mythorphan to remove the now missing recorded files from the database
perl $morphan --pass=$pass --dodbdelete >> $log
#that should be it
echo stopping mythtvremodel on `date "+%m/%d/%y %l:%M:%S %p"` >> $log
exit 0

And there you have it. Now, since I run mythbuntu, I have put this script in /etc/rc0.d (thats rc zero . d) and have named it K03mythtvremodel, thus it is run when my system shuts down, but before all the samba shares and drives are unmounted. As I said, since I use mythwelcome to shutdown my machine when idle, this seemed like the best solution.

Hope it helps someone!