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.