MythTV video streaming hack

One of our MythTV frontends is a small Dell netbook with SDD and therefor not much disk space. Therefor I decided to hack MythTV to stream videos from the Mythweb Video interface.

First off I had to enable MP4 streaming since I'm often transcoding to MP4.

--- modules/stream/stream_raw.pl.orig  2010-03-10 14:08:32.000000000 +0100
+++ modules/stream/stream_raw.pl       2010-03-10 14:08:48.000000000 +0100
@@ -39,4 +39,8 @@
         $suffix = '.avi';
     }
+    elsif ($basename =~ /\.mp4$/) {
+        $type   = 'video/avi';
+        $suffix = '.mp4';
+    }
     else {
         print header(),

After enabling MP4 streaming you'll have to hack a bit in the tv.pl script. It starts out by determinig the recording type simply by looking at the request URL.

--- modules/stream/tv.pl.orig  2010-03-04 21:02:28.000000000 +0100
+++ modules/stream/tv.pl       2010-03-10 14:26:16.000000000 +0100
@@ -19,40 +19,69 @@
     }
 
-# Which show are we streaming?
-    our $chanid    = url_param('chanid');
-    our $starttime = url_param('starttime');
-    if ($Path[1]) {
-        $chanid    = $Path[1];
-        $starttime = $Path[2];
-        $starttime =~ s/\.\w+$//;
-    }
+# Determine wether we're streaming video or tv
 
-# Get the basename from the database
-    my $sh = $dbh->prepare('SELECT basename, title, subtitle, endtime-starttime
-                              FROM recorded
-                             WHERE starttime=FROM_UNIXTIME(?)
-                                   AND recorded.chanid   = ?');
-    $sh->execute($starttime, $chanid);
-    our ($basename, $title, $subtitle, $runtime) = $sh->fetchrow_array();
-    $sh->finish;
-
-# No match?
-    unless ($basename =~ /\w/) {
-        print header(),
-              "Unknown recording requested.\n";
-        exit;
-    }
+if ($Path[2]) {
+       $type = "tv";
+} elsif ($Path[1]) {
+       $type = "video";
+}
 
-# Find the local file
-    our $filename;
-    $sh = $dbh->prepare('SELECT DISTINCT dirname
-                           FROM storagegroup');
-    $sh->execute();
-    while (my ($video_dir) = $sh->fetchrow_array()) {
-        next unless (-e "$video_dir/$basename");
-        $filename = "$video_dir/$basename";
-        last;
-    }
-    $sh->finish;
+if ( $type eq "tv" ) {
+       # Which show are we streaming?
+           our $chanid    = url_param('chanid');
+           our $starttime = url_param('starttime');
+           if ($Path[1]) {
+               $chanid    = $Path[1];
+               $starttime = $Path[2];
+               $starttime =~ s/\.\w+$//;
+           }
+
+       # Get the basename from the database
+           my $sh = $dbh->prepare('SELECT basename, title, subtitle, endtime-starttime
+                                     FROM recorded
+                                    WHERE starttime=FROM_UNIXTIME(?)
+                                          AND recorded.chanid   = ?');
+           $sh->execute($starttime, $chanid);
+           our ($basename, $title, $subtitle, $runtime) = $sh->fetchrow_array();
+           $sh->finish;
+
+       # Find the local file
+           our $filename;
+           $sh = $dbh->prepare('SELECT DISTINCT dirname
+                                  FROM storagegroup');
+           $sh->execute();
+           while (my ($video_dir) = $sh->fetchrow_array()) {
+               next unless (-e "$video_dir/$basename");
+               $filename = "$video_dir/$basename";
+               last;
+           }
+           $sh->finish;
+
+           1;
+} elsif ( $type eq "video" ) {
+       # Which show are we streaming?
+           our $vidid     = url_param('vidid');
+           if ($Path[1]) {
+               $vidid     = $Path[1];
+           }
+       # Get the basename from the database
+           my $sh = $dbh->prepare('SELECT title, subtitle, filename
+                                    FROM videometadata
+                                    WHERE intid = ?');
+           $sh->execute($vidid);
+           our ($title, $subtitle, $basename) = $sh->fetchrow_array();
+           $sh->finish;
+
+       # Find the local file
+           our $filename;
+           $sh = $dbh->prepare('SELECT DISTINCT dirname
+                                  FROM storagegroup
+                                  WHERE groupname = "Videos"');
+           $sh->execute();
+           my $video_dir = $sh->fetchrow_array();
+               $filename = "$video_dir/$basename";
+
+           $sh->finish;
 
-    1;
+           1;
+}

All that is now left is to make the webinterface display the new links.

--- modules/video/tmpl/default/video.php.orig   2010-03-10 13:30:31.000000000 +0100
+++ modules/video/tmpl/default/video.php        2010-03-10 13:57:53.000000000 +0100
@@ -307,5 +307,8 @@
         <div id="<?php echo $video->intid; ?>_browse" class="hidden"><?php echo $video->browse; ?></div>
         <div id="<?php echo $video->intid; ?>-title" class="title">
-            <a href="<?php echo $video->url; ?>"><?php echo html_entities($video->title); ?></a><?php 
+<?php echo html_entities($video->title); ?>
+            <a href="<?php echo $video->url; ?>"><img src="<?php echo skin_url ?>/img/video_sm.png"></a>
+            <a href="<?php echo ".//pl/stream/$video->intid" . ".asx"; ?>"><img src="<?php echo skin_url ?>/img/play_sm.png">
+           </a><?php 
                   if (($video->season > 0) && ($video->episode >= 0)) 
                       printf('(S%02d E%02d)', $video->season, $video->episode); 

As you can see this is just a quick hack and could probably have been better integrated into MythTV and my Perl skills feel a bit rusty too.

Sorry for the crappy display of code. If you want the diffs as properly formatted text files just drop me a line.

Let me know if you have any comments or other cool hacks.

Update: I split out my mythweb patches and you can download them here:

mythweb-0.22_p22763-carppout-debug.patch
mythweb-0.22_p22763-mp4-streaming.patch
mythweb-0.22_p22763-myth-video-streaming.patch
mythweb-0.22_p22763-path-list.patch
mythweb-0.22_p22763-tmpl-error.patch