Add EyeTV programs remotely

Nov 08, '02 09:36:32AM

Contributed by: ddldreaming

I wanted the ability to add a program item to my recording schedule while I was at work. The EyeTV sits attached to my trusty old G4/400 Sawtooth desktop at home, which is accessible via ssh from my work computer. So I thought about it a little bit and tested; it turns out to be very simple!

Files of extension .tvpi (TV Programming Info) are associated with the EyeTV application. If you save an info file from a listing on TitanTV to your Mac's disk, typing "open program.tvpi" at a command line prompt will cause EyeTV to interpret the file, adding the specified program to your schedule. If EyeTV is not already open, it's started and its live display window will also open (which slows my G4 down a lot, so I prefer to leave the program running with the viewer window closed).

This means all you need to do is save the program info file to the system you're working on, transfer it over to your EyeTV-attached Mac, and open it. You can do this in just a couple of steps. Once you've saved a tvpi file locally, transfer it over to the Mac:

% scp program.tvpi username@home.mac:/tmp/program.tvpi
Then just execute it via ssh:
% ssh username@home.mac "open /tmp/program.tvpi"
Voila!

You can confirm that the program has been added by logging into the Mac via ssh and checking the "EyeTV Archive" directory (its location is configured under "Storage" in EyeTV's prefs). It's easy to tell by the time stamps on the directories there whether a new item was successfully added. Actual program info is stored inside the eyetvp file within the new directory, in XML text.

It's pretty trivial to edit the tvpi file to whatever time, date and channel you want, so you're not limited to just the programs listed on TitanTV's site.

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