Mythical

Yet another Kodi plugin for MythTV.

Why?

I needed a simple MythTv plugin for Kodi, so here is the one I wrote.

I am sharing this in hopes that someone else may find it useful.

Kodi 18 and before

The addon zip that works for previous versions using Python 2.x is at https://github.com/evuraan/Mythical/tree/MythTV_Plugin_For_Pre_Python3_Kodi - download the plugin zip and follow instructions from there.

If you are using Kodi 19+ that uses Python 3, read on.

Setting up

Since you have a MythBackend running, it is assumed that you've the technical prowess to plough through the three simple steps involved.

Step 1 : Setup your BaseURL

In most cases, MythTV records to /var/lib/mythtv/recordings folder. We need to make this folder available for Kodi to do HTTP GETs.

If you have apache, the following would allow internal network 192.168.1.0/24 to access this directory. That is, if your MythTV backend server is at IP 192.168.1.100, you'd now be able to reachhttp://192.168.1.100/recordings/from your local network.

 Alias /recordings/ "/var/lib/mythtv/recordings/"
    <Directory "/var/lib/mythtv/recordings/">
    AllowOverride None
    Require ip 192.168.1.0/24
 </Directory>

(Natrually you will need to replace the IP with one that matches your internal network.)

Step 2 : Setup generate_info cronjob

Next, we need to setup a cron job that would generate /var/lib/mythtv/recordings/recordings.txt - I've two scripts with the same functionality : a python script generate_info.py, or a bash variant, generate_info.sh - pick whichever you're comfortable with.

Setting up generate_info.sh:

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/evuraan/Mythical/master/scripts/generate_info.sh -O /usr/local/bin/generate_info.sh
$ chmod u+x  /usr/local/bin/generate_info.sh
$ echo "*/15 * * * *   `whoami` /usr/local/bin/generate_info.sh 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null || :" | sudo tee -a /etc/crontab

Or, setting up generate_info.py:

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/evuraan/Mythical/master/scripts/generate_info.py -O /usr/local/bin/generate_info.py
$ chmod u+x  /usr/local/bin/generate_info.py
$ echo "*/15 * * * *   `whoami` /usr/local/bin/generate_info.py 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null || :" | sudo tee -a /etc/crontab

Please verify that you see /var/lib/mythtv/recordings/recordings.txt updated every 15 minutes, as this is an important step.

Step 3 : Install Kodi plugin Mythical

Download and install the plugin.video.Mythical.zip from "Releases" tab.

By default, the plugin uses a pre-defined set of free sample videos from my server - we need to change this so it uses yours instead. Modify your $HOME/.kodi/addons/plugin.video.Mythical/main.py with your BaseUrl from Step 1 above:

BaseURL = "http://192.168.1.100/recordings/"

Notes

Heavily influenced by romanvm's example plugin.
If your recordings are MPEG files, I suggest you setup video cache for Kodi. Here is my advancedsettings.xml:

<advancedsettings>
<cache>
    <memorysize>0</memorysize>
   <buffermode>2</buffermode>
   <readfactor>80</readfactor>
</cache>
</advancedsettings>

Please consider Giving to your PBS Station.

License: GPL v.3

evuraan / Mythical