Unofficial EyeTV Spotlight plugin

Sections

1. Project News
2. Project Description
3. How does the plugin work?
4. How to use the plugin?
5. To Dos
6. License
7. Contributors

Quick Links

• Sourceforge Page
• Browse CVS
• Bug Report
• Support Request
• Patches
• Feature Request

Downloads

• UnofficialEyeTV.mdimporter 0.3
• UnofficialEyeTV.mdimporter 0.2
• UnofficialEyeTV.mdimporter 0.1

1. Project News

   • Sep 29, 2006: Release 0.3. This release aims to provide better handling due to changes introduce in EyeTV2. The metadata is no longer associated with the .mpg file, but the .eyetv folder.
   • Nov 14, 2005: Release 0.2. This release fixes a problem with .eyetvr generated by older versions EyeTV, in which 'recording title' and 'episode title' keys are missing. The 'title' key will be used if the two keys are missing. A new custom attribute (net_sourceforge_aneyetvimporter_EyeTVRecordingID) is added.
   • Nov 9, 2005: Release 0.1
   • Nov 9, 2005: Project started, details coming soon.

2. Project Description

   EyeTV is a PVR software that works with several tuner devices and is very popular in Mac OS X communities. However, EyeTV has yet to include features that help users manage and search recorded programs. For example, you may backup some recordings to external storage and they no longer show up in the EyeTV program list; however, with this importer you can search and categorize recordings from Finder.

   This project aims to implement a Spotlight plugin for EyeTV recordings. An EyeTV recording consists of a .mpg file (media streams), a .eyetvr meta data file and a few other files. This plugin, UnofficialEyeTV.mdimport, retrieves the meta data from the .eyetvr file and supplies them to Spotlight when it indexes the .eyetv folder. As a result, users can use Finder to categorize recordings, and can search for recording using the meta data.

3. How does the plugin work?

   Note the following meta data and their mapping to Spotlight attributes may be subject to change in the future. The description here reflects the status of current implementation (version 0.3).

   As mentioned in the previous section, the meta data of a recording can be found in the .evetyr file. When Spotlight is indexing a .mpg file it asks this plugin for the meta data associated with the .mpg file.

   When asked about meta data of a .mpg file, the plugin first looks for the associated .eyetvr file. If the .eyetvr file can not be found, the plugin will not return any meta data. If the .eyetvr file is found, the following meta data will be retrieved from the file.

   • recording title
   • episode title
   • title
   • description
   • actual duration
   • actual start time
   • width
   • height
   • video bitrate
   • channel name
   • id
   • has video

   and these meta data will be supplied to Spotlight as:

   Spotlight attributes	.eyetvr meta data
   kMDItemTitle	'recording title - episode title', or 'title' (.eyetvr of older EyeTV versions)
   kMDItemDescription	'description'
   kMDItemDurationSeconds	actual duration
   kMDItemContentCreationDate	actual start time
   kMDItemPixelWidth	width
   kMDItemPixelHeight	height
   kMDItemVideoBitRate	video bitrate
   kMDItemMediaTypes	(Video,Sound) or (Sound) if has video is false
   kMDItemWhereFroms	(channel names)
   net_sourceforge_aneyetvimporter_EyeTVRecordingID	id

4. How to use the plugin?

   First, the plugin must be installed. It is recommended that you install the plugin in ~/Library/Spotlight/. If your ~/Library/Spotlight does not exist, you can simply create one. Installation is as simple as drag UnofficialEyeTV.mdimport into the directory.

   If your EyeTV archive directory is not excluded from Spotlight indexing, then you can re-index existing recordings by executing

   		  mdimport -r ~/Library/Spotlight/UnofficialEyeTV.mdimport
   		

   For most people, the EyeTV archive directory is excluded from Spotlight indexing. You will have to either configure Spotlight to index the archive, or force Spotlight to index the directory. You can force Spotlight to index the default EyeTV archive directory by issuing the command

   		  mdimport -f ~/Library/EyeTV\ Archive/
   		

   You will have to type this command every time you want to update the Spotlight database.

   For troubleshooting, first check if the plugin is installed properly by typing the command

   		  mdimport -L
   		

   and see if "/Users/<id>/Library/Spotlight/UnofficialEyeTV.mdimporter" is in the list. If not, the plugin is not installed properly.

   If you still have problem, try forcing the index with '-d2' flags, e.g.,

   		  mdimport -d2 -f ~/Library/EyeTV\ Archive/
   		

   and the debug message may help you determine what went wrong.

   Once Spotlight properly indexes the recordings, you can query recordings using those Spotlight attributes, or just simply perform text search from Finder to match words in programing or episode titles, and descriptions.

5. To Dos

6. License

   Software developed under this project is distributed under the BSD license.