My first working crack at getting a filesystem overlay working between MythTV, Galleon, and my TiVo is finished. If you’re brave, check it out.
© 2005 – 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Every few years, I end up relearning Java for some project or another. Today, that project is Galleon, the fantastic TiVo Home Media Server. I’ve been sort of mildly involved in another person’s attempts to get MythTV and his TiVo working nicely together.
The basic situation is this: I want to be able to watch stuff I’ve recorded on my MythTV box via my TiVo. Galleon already does this.
Using the “GoBack” TiVo feature, Galleon acts like another TiVo on the network, and sends a show to the TiVo. Normally this is used to send a .TiVo file from your computer back to the TiVo. In the case of TiVo-to-TiVo communication, they include the metadata about the show (title, air date, duration, description, etc) before starting the data transfer. Galleon stores the metadata to a local database when it downloads shows via the ToGo feature.
It is possible to send any valid MPEG stream to the TiVo, but unless the Galleon database has metadata for the show, there will be nothing but the filename on the TiVo end when it transfers. In the case of MythTV shows, the metadata is contained in the MythTV database. I’m hoping to create a MythTV “application” for Galleon that will connect to the MythTV database, and populate the TiVo with the needed metadata.
Since I’m so green on Java, I’m doing something else as a “proof-of-concept”. It was suggested that some of the metadata could be encoded into the filename. This requires two halves: a parser in Galleon to extract the data, and the files to be named with their metadata encoded.
On the Galleon side, I’m digging around with the StringTokenizer, and generally getting my feet wet with the Galleon source and banging my head on the java compiler.
On the filesystem side, I’m going to use FUSE to create an overlay filesystem that queries the MythTV database, and builds a list of files based on an NFS mount’s contents. (Which I’ll NFS mount from my MythTV box.)
Mostly I just wanted to write a FUSE application. :)
© 2005 – 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Tonight I discovered that finding out the historical worth of money is a little tricky to calculate. :) On Poirot tonight, he bought 19 pairs of silk stockings in order to trap a thief. The clerk kept warning him that they were “very expensive”. The final bill was 35 shillings per pair. I thought this was rather odd that a value not involving pounds would be considered “very expensive”. Feeling very detective-oriented, I had to investigate.
First of all, I found a nice conversion chart for British currency. 35 shillings is 1.75 pounds. The story took place in roughly 1928, but that doesn’t change the shillings calculation because even after the decimalization in 1971, shillings and pounds kept their 20-to-1 ratio.
Trying to find “current worth” of historical monies was a little more difficult. I found the How Much Is That? site, and it seems that 1.75 pounds is worth about $95 in present day. Good stockings are about $15 a pair now, and since nylon was invented in 1935, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that good stockings would be about 10 times more expensive in 1928.
© 2005, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
My friend Brian just had his article-writing debut on O’Reilly‘s ONLamp site. He wrote about how to use XMLTV to help manage your TV viewing schedules if you don’t have a DVR doing it for you (or not doing it well enough).
© 2005, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
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