How to add Recording Groups to MythTV

Assigning Recording Groups to your recordings gives you great flexibility when it comes to organising your recordings into different folders. It’s not very intuitive how you set up and maintain recording groups in MythTV so here’s how:

Assuming you’re using a gnome desktop either directly or via VNC then go into the MythTV frontend (Applications -> Sound & Video) and select Manage Recordings.
Next select Upcoming Recordings. Highlight a recording and press the “i” key.
Then from the menu which is now displayed press Enter on the Storage Options option. Then select the Include in the “Default” recording group option and scroll up to Create a new recording group. Type in a suitable name and click OK. You can repeat this step for as many new recording groups as you need.

Once you’ve created a bunch of different Recording Groups you can then assign these Groups to your recordings either directly via the MythTV Front-End or via MythWeb.

I’m using Recording Groups as the main folders to allow me to organise the recordings to suit my needs:

  • Childrens (the recording group)
    • Engie Benjy (the show title)
      2009-05-10-Far out.mpg (the episode)
      2009-05-11-One Step Closer.mpg
      etc
    • Chucklevision
      2009-05-10-Silence is golden.mpg
      2009-05-11-On the Hoof.mpg
      etc
  • Mums
    • Cash in the Attic
      2009-05-10-Peter Shilton.mpg
      2009-05-11-Frank Carson.mpg
      etc
    • Desperate Housewives
      2009-05-10.mpg
      2009-05-11.mpg
      etc
  • Dads
    • Top Gear
      2009-05-10.mpg
      2009-05-11.mpg
      etc
    • Traffic Cops
      2009-05-10-Cheating Death.mpg
      2009-05-11-Cameras Don’t Lie.mpg
      etc

As I’ve mentioned previously, organising things this way means my children can select “Childrens” from the streamer menus and they will be presented with only the recordings they’re interested in. My wife can select “Mums” and will only get to see hers.

If everything was organised by Show Title, for example, then they’d each have to trawl through endless lists of programmes that are of no interest to them.

Since I’m not using the MythTV Front-end to watch the TV Shows that have been recorded via MythTV there are a couple of other options which you might find of interest:

Give your recordings a human readable filename

Convert your recordings to another format using nuvexport