MythVideo Setup

From the MythTV frontend, choose Utilities/Setup from the main menu, then Setup, Media Settings, Videos Settings, and General Settings from the menu tree. Navigate to the first field named "Directories that hold videos". Here, you can enter your video directories as a colon separated list. You would typically use the directories that you mounted (see above) or a local directory. For example:

     /mnt/videoserv/DVD/sda:/mnt/videoserv/DVD/sdb

You should change the field named "Directory that holds movie posters" to point to the shared posters directory that you created on the video server. For example:

     /mnt/videoserv/DVD/posters

Under the field named "Default view", I prefer to pick "Listings".

On the second page, choose all of the items in the list. You may set "Video tree remembers last selected position" item to whatever your preference is. There is nothing that needs setting on pages 3 thru 7 but you must navigate through them all to save your choices.

Exit the setup screens, all the way back to top-level "Utilities/Setup" screen and then pick "Video Manager". You should see a list of all of the videos that are available in the directories that you set, above.

Scroll down to the first video and hit the memu button on your remote or the "M" key on the keyboard. A menu should pop up. Pick the "Manually Enter Video #" choice. A box will pop up that says, "Enter IMDB #".

Note that under Mythbuntu 9.04 (MythTV 0.21), the manual entering of IMDB numbers is broken because somebody made a typo when naming the IMDB menu. If it is broken, you will see the "Enter IMDB #" menu as soon as you fire up the Video Manager and you will not be able to enter IMDB numbers at any point. The fix is to run the following command from the command line, as root:

     find /usr/share/mythtv/themes/ -name "video-ui.xml" -print |
       xargs sed -i 's/enterimdb/entertmdb/g'

Or, if you didn't change the root password and are still using the sudo method to do all of your maintenance, try this:

     find /usr/share/mythtv/themes/ -name "video-ui.xml" -print |
       xargs sudo sed -i 's/enterimdb/entertmdb/g'

Note that there won't be any fixes for this problem for MythTV version 0.21, since the geeks have all moved on to yet another way of doing things that's way more better (Yeah, like we haven't heard that before) and they aren't interested in fixing the old stuff.

You will need to surf over to www.imdb.com on the Internet, using another computer and the Web browser. Look up the name of the movie in the search box and pick the correct movie from the search list (you're usually looking for the item that says "Media from ..."). The link to the movie will include a number that looks something like "tt0073906". You want the significant digits of that number. Enter the number (e.g. 73906) into the pop up box that says, "Enter IMDB #".

MythVideo will look up the appropriate movie poster for the movie, cache it in the directory chosen above and fill in the database with all of the relevant information about the movie (e.g. director, year, run time) from IMDB. When you browse through the movies later on, you'll see all of this info.

That's all there is to it. Set up all of the movies that you've loaded into the DVD repository in the same manner.

Finally, just in case you want to know more about MythVideo, you can find a comprehensive HowTo at: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/MythVideo.