MiniDLNA + MythTV

You may remember I capture OTA TV signals with a MythTV install on Raspberry Pi ( Raspian).

Traditionally if one wants to stream MythTV files across the network one sets up MythWeb.  The Pi is quite limited and the MythTV setup there is finicky, so I wanted to do it with a lighter service.

MiniDLNA

DLNA is a plug-n-play service used to serve media files across a network.  MiniDLNA is a tiny, flyweight implementation of DLNA on linux.

I installed minidlna, edited the /etc/minidlna.conf to point to /video (external drive).

I crank up VLC, the all-singing, all-dancing linux+android video.  The DLNA server shows up on the network:

That worked (and the files play), but shows the raw filenames which are used by Myth’s database:  1052_202006102330.ts, for example.  1052 is the internal channel ID, and the rest is the timestamp when the recording started.   Awesome for Myth, not awesome for humans.  Note:  TS means transport stream, the raw digital data from the antenna.  AFAIK they are MPEG-2 compressed streams in the US.

Luckily, Myth includes mythlink.pl, a perl script to make symlinks of the .ts files, by default in a subdir called show_names, so /video/show_names in my case.

Now I can access 1052_202006102330.ts as Peter Gunn - 2020-06-10 - 11:30pm

Much more informative, but I get a playback failure.  Can’t be the file since it plays back with the original name.  Must be something about the new name or the fact it’s a link.  Hmmm.

I read the minidlna.conf man page and see a wide_links=yes option, which allows you to follow symlinks outside the specfied media directory.  Sounds promising.

I read the output of mythlink.pl –help and see an –underscores option which replaces filename spaces with underscores.  Now the file is a little less elegant, but also less likely to dork up a handoff between programs/scripts: Peter_Gunn-2020-06-10-11:30pm

That works.  I suspect it was the wide_links setting that did it, though I didn’t test them separately to check.

To automate the linking, I set up a cron job to link the files (with underscores!) hourly.