Getting the Rip DVD part of MythVideo to work

One of the nicest features of MythVideo, is being able to store your collection of DVD’s on your hardrive.
From there, its a simple task of selecting the Video from the Video Gallery, and hitting play.

You can fetch all the Movie’s details from IMDB, including poster art and movie ratings.
This makes it much more convenient, and more useful than having to fetch the DVD from your collection to watch it.

The only downside that I can see, is that you’ll start to run out of disk space very quickly, as each movie will take up between 4GB and 8GB.

I faced a few challenges in getting this working, and I’m going to try shed as much light on this as possible.

First off, make sure you’ve got MythVideo installed. Its pretty simple… If you can play videos that weren’t recorded by MythTV, then you probably have it installed.

Then you’ll have to create a boot script to start mtd on startup.
This is what my /etc/init.d/myth_mtd looks like.

#!/bin/sh
# Start/stop/restart myth transcoder
#
# Start mtd:
mtd_start() {
  if [ -x /usr/local/bin/mtd ]; then
    # If there is an old PID file (no mtd running), clean it up:
    if [ -r /var/run/mtd.pid ]; then
      if ! ps axc | grep mtd 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null ; then
        echo "Cleaning up old /var/run/mtd.pid."
        rm -f /var/run/mtd.pid
      fi
    fi
    /usr/local/bin/mtd >> /var/log/mythtv_mtd.log 2>&1 &mtdpid=$!
    echo $mtdpid > /var/run/mtd.pid
  fi
}

# Stop mtd:
mtd_stop() {
  # If there is no PID file, ignore this request...
  if [ -r /var/run/mtd.pid ]; then
    killall mtd
  fi
}

# Restart mtd:
mtd_restart() {
  mtd_stop
  mtd_start
}

case "$1" in
'start')
  mtd_start
  ;;
'stop')
  mtd_stop
  ;;
'restart')
  mtd_restart
  ;;
*)
  echo "usage $0 start|stop|restart"
esac

Set this script executable:

chmod +x /etc/init.d/myth_mtd

Then set the script to run on startup and shutdown:

update-rc.d myth_mtd defaults 95

With any luck, thats all you need.

Pop a DVD into your drive, crank up your MythTV, go to Video and hit Rip DVD.