Make an Mplayer Playlist for use as MythTV Playlists

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Using Mplayer Playlists with MythTV

Ever wish you could queue up a number of videos into a playlist and feed that playlist to MythTV (or more accurately MythVideo, as I do not yet know of a way to make a MythTV playlist for the Myth recordings)?

The best way that I've found to accomplish this is with an mplayer playlist (a *.pls file). An mplayer playlist is nothing more than an ASCII text file listing each video file consecutively on a new line.

NOTE: Mplayer will not recognize playlist files unless you add the -playlist option to your mplayer command line in the MythVideo file type screen under MythTV Setup.

Follow these steps to create an mplayer playlist file:

In a terminal window and navigate to the MythVideo dir holding the video files you want to queue up.
Create a text file ending in ".pls", such as mplayer-playlist.pls (this will be your actual mplayer playlist).
In your text editor, create the list of video file names (with paths if not in the current dir). Put each video file on a new line and put them in the order that you want them to play.
Next, add the *.pls file type to the MythVideo setup, using a line such as mplayer -fs -zoom -quiet -vo vx -playlist %s (the -playlist option is critical here).
Have MythVideo scan for new videos (it will now recognize the mplayer-playlist.pls file).
Run MythVideo and choose mplayer-playlist.pls from the video listings.
Mplayer should now proceed to play the videos, ordered as they are in your *.pls file.

If you happen to have a dir full of shows that are already in numerical order (like a full season of a show numbered in the traditional “Fictional_Show_S01E01.avi” fashion), you can generate an mplayer playlist automatically. Navigate to the dir and issue the following command:

$ dir -1 > mplayer-playlist.pls

This command will generate the playlist file with all the videos in proper episode order, assuming all the video files were numbered correctly to begin with.

Depending on your paths and where you are when you issue the command, you may end up with an entry in the mplayer playlist for the playlist file itself (i.e. mplayer-playlist.pls). You will want to remove this line before playing.

Ideally, there would be someway to generate a MythTV playlist without having to first create an mplayer playlist. Something using the remote and MythTV interface would obviously be best. Until that time, the mplayer playlist file technique isn't too much of a PITA. I've used these techniques numerous times on my Slackware MythTV setup and it's always worked perfectly.

Design by Minimalistic Design

Marshall Trade Corporation

Kevin R. Marshall

Using Mplayer Playlists with MythTV