Notes on TVWish Install

First, unpack the tvwish.tar file in a convenient directory on your system. You need

• MythTV 0.16 or greater (0.17 preferred). As far as I know works with all later versions, though only tested to 0.21.2.
• Perl (You almost definitely already have this.)
• Perl Libraries: LWP, DBI/Mysql and Date::Manip. These are standard in almost all modern Perl distributions.
• The MythTV "mysql.txt" file in one of the standard places, or failing that the default MythTV local SQL server configuration.

Quick Install

1. tar xvfz tvwish.tar.gz ; cd tvwish
2. make test
3. make personal
4. Edit files in "personal" directory such as master and goodmovies.txt to your taste. Also crontab-line if you want to run it other than every day at 6pm.
5. make install

Or just make install if you are brave!

More Details

CD to your unpack directory.

As an initial test say "make test" -- this will run with some of the sample files but not store recordings. In most cases you will see some output indicating it wants to record some upcoming movies and perhaps TV shows. You may also see errors if you are missing some standard Perl libraries.

You can also try "make vertest | less" to see a more verbose test, where it explains each rule it processes. You can try "make sample" to run with several TV series as well as the movie list, which should find more shows for you as a test.

When you are ready, you can create your own subdirectory ("personal") and copy all the files in "lists" and the master file into it by typing "make personal"

Now edit personal/master. It includes various other files with options. Pick which ones you want to try, and edit or trim. You will probably want to start with goodmovies.txt. Load your personal copy into your text editor and delete the movies you have already seen or don't want to see. Add any others you might like.

You can also consider some of the provided series files. You can tune the threshold on the Include line for what portion of the series you want to see. I also recommend you keep the topepisodes.txt list and the topseries.txt though you may want to delete from your personal copies shows you have seen or know you never want to see.

Now test again with "make pertest"

Run Live

You are ready to run it live

This will look similar to your test run. It will output the movies and shows it queued for recording. You can now go into MythTV or MythWeb and you will see these shows on your upcoming recordings list.

If you run it again, it should do nothing, because it doesn't reschedule shows it already scheduled.

Put in crontab

If all worked well, you can put it in the cron. You can type

and that will install a line in the crontab to run the program every day, copied from personal/crontab-line. No permissions are needed, you can use your own crontab file or mythv's. Root's is not required and probably a poor idea.

You can also use the command crontab -e to edit your crontab file yourself.

This will run TVWish every day at 6pm. You can adjust the timing as desired. Note that with the default verbosity option used in runwish, v=1, it will output new recordings it has queued on the standard output, plus any problems. Your cron program will e-mail these to you. If you prefer to not get these e-mails just use v=0 in runwish.

A good time to run it is right after mythfilldatabase has run to bring in new TV listings. However, if you are importing dynamic critic's lists -- especially ones where a critic in the morning recommends shows to watch that evening -- you will want to run it more often, even without new listing data. In theory you could run it just once a week but since listings sometimes change I would stick with once or twice a day.

You're all set! Now you can go hunting for lists of movies or episodes of TV series you are interested in watching. If you find or build lists of series episodes with quality rankings consider contributing them back to this project.

Suggestions

By default, suggestions are not turned on. Edit your personal/master file to uncomment the inclusion of the personal/suggest file, and make modifications to the suggest file as desired.

Library

Note that a small perl include file, mythlib.pl, is included with the program. This library will probaby eventually join the MythTV project so other Perl programs working with MythTV can use it. When you set the current directory in runwish it is automatically able to find this library in the current directory. If you want to run another way, you need to put this library somewhere Perl can find it.