Implementing parental filters with MythTV

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The other morning I walked out to my five year old watching Robot Chicken. This isn't what I would call the highlight of my parenting career, but it did leave me with an immediate need to come up with a solution to stopping the kids from watching inappropriate things now that they're big enough to work their way through the MythTV user interface without our assistance. Its now quite common for me to wake up in the morning and discover that the kids have turned the monitor on in the living room, have found one of their shows, and are happily watching. (I guess it says something about the ease of use of the MythTV user interface that my four and five year olds have no trouble navigating it without assistance. Specifically, the video thumbnail of the various recordings is a killer feature because it helps kids who can't read yet find the shows they want.) The animated thumbnail of the recording appears in the bottom right of this example image. Back to my need to filter recordings. Unfortunately this isn't covered in the MythTV book (Amazon), mainly because it didn't seem to me to be a killer feature at…

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How to transcode video for the Nokia N800

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I have a Nokia N800 that I haven't had much time to play with, but I am about to go away on a trip which will involve a lot of time commuting on buses, so I figure I should start thinking about it again. Luckily for me, this page has pretty good instructions of what settings to use with mencoder to make it all look good on the N800. I haven't tried them yet, but I will report back when I do.

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Building a symlink tree for MythTV recordings

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I wanted to build a directory of symlinks that pointed to my MythTV recordings, so I wrote a little python script to do it for me. I figure someone else might find this useful too... #!/usr/bin/python # Copyright (C) Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) 2007 # Released under the terms of the GNU GPL import MySQLdb import os import re from socket import gethostname # Connect to the MythTV database based on the MythTV config config_values = {} home = os.environ.get('HOME') config = open(home + '/.mythtv/mysql.txt') for line in config.readlines(): if not line.startswith('#') and len(line) > 5: (key, value) = line.rstrip('\n').split('=') config_values[key] = value db_connection = MySQLdb.connect(host = config_values['DBHostName'], user = config_values['DBUserName'], passwd = config_values['DBPassword'], db = config_values['DBName']) cursor = db_connection.cursor(MySQLdb.cursors.DictCursor) # Regexp for what is allowed in the symlink name unsafe = re.compile('[^a-zA-Z0-9\-\:_]+') # Find the recordings directory -- this assumes you haven't used an # identifier string for this machine... cursor.execute('select * from settings where value="RecordFilePrefix" and ' 'hostname="%s";' % gethostname()) row = cursor.fetchone() basedir = row['data'] # Now find all the recordings we have at the moment cursor.execute('select title, subtitle, starttime, basename from recorded;') for i in range(cursor.rowcount): row = cursor.fetchone() title = row['title'] subtitle = row['subtitle'] if subtitle…

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Review

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"If you're interested in setting up a PVR, then this is definitely a book to check out. Apress sells the paper version for $30, and offers an eBook for $15. Amazon offers it for $19.79, but I doubt that price will last long. I definitely give this book a 5 out of 5..." http://www.yeraze.com/article.php/20070603160650701

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Book printed!

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I got off the phone with Catherine a few hours ago, and apparently my copies of the book have arrived at home (I'm in Dublin for work at the moment). That's very exciting. Looks like now would be a good time to buy it, while it's shipping soon and still on special.

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I just noticed…

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That I forgot to put the slides from Stewart and my MythTV tutorial at LCA online. So, here they are, and sorry for the delay. You can also see the video of the tutorial here, and the homework we set here. Weirdly, there is even a remix video of the presentation.

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Done and done

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Stewart finished off the last trailing chapter of the MythTV book a week or so ago, and I finished the last copy edit (the process where we learn US grammar) just now. That means we only need to have page layout done for a chapter or so and we're home. Hurrah!

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MythNetTV beta 4

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As it says in the email: To: Discussion about mythtv <mythtv-users@mythtv.org> Subject: MythNetTV beta 4 Hi again. MythNetTv is my video downloader / aggregator / importer thingie for MythTV. I've spent a little longer testing this beta, and I think it's getting kinda ready for a real release number or something. New things in this version (from the change log): - Made --update more terse - Made --update more liberal about what it considers to be a video, specifically added video/quick time and text/html (to work around the rather broken http://www.mobuzztv.com/uk/rss/quicktime - Added a filter option to --download to constrain it to only downloading shows with a specific title - Added transcoding for mov and wmv2 files - If there is a straggling import, and it causes as error, just skip it and mark it as imported - Don't reset transferred data statistic when we start downloading a show again - Started implementing moniker support for downloads - Unsupported monikers will result in an attempt to download the URL using mplayer (which works for RTSP and MMS at the least) Yes, that's right. You can now download only shows with a specific title, and you can also download any protocol…

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