I am currently running Mythweb on Lighttpd for remotely scheduling all my programs. I rarely use the MythTv front-end for anything except playback. (I have a separate front-end from back-end so its kinda a pain to start the front-end just to schedule a recording.) Anyways getting the basics of Mythweb running was easy enough, however certain features didn’t appear to be working. One feature is the Video cover art. I decided to figure out why.
MythTv
First, I had to add some cover art through MythTv for a video. You can do this by selecting the video and hitting the E key. Tab down to the Cover and then browse and select the image file. Then you can tab to save and hit enter. Note you can only browse within the video directory so I made a directory named coverart and placed my image in there.
Mythconverg Database
We need to look at two tables in the MythTv MySQL database. I used phpMyAdmin to make changes. All the video details are stored in the videometadata table. There is a column named coverfile which contains a partial path to the image file. The video record I just updated through MythTv contained the path for the video art work (coverart/IMAGE.jpg). Note this is a sub path of the video directory.
In the storagegroup table add a record with the groupname set to Coverart and dirname set to the full system path for your cover art directory which has to be a sub directory of the video directory.
Lighttpd Configuration
I hadn’t enabled perl on lighttpd. The sample configuration file says to add this
cgi.assign = ( ".pl" => "/usr/bin/perl" )
Instead, I removed the comment from /usr/local/etc/lighttpd/modules.conf for the line include “conf.d/cgi.conf” saved modules.conf and restarted lighttpd.
Mythweb
mythweb/classes/Video.php line 41 replace Coverart in the WHERE clause with Videos. Why would the section comment say “Video storage directories” but then query for the Coverart?
line 78 change from $this->cover_url = ‘pl/coverart/’.$this->cover_file; to $this->cover_url = ‘pl/coverart/’.basename($this->cover_file); This makes just the filename be passed to the mythweb/modules/coverart/handler.pl so it can stream the file. An interesting side note is why not use the video_covers symbolic link in the data directory? The path has already been verified so why not use $this->cover_url = ‘data/video_covers/’.basename($this->cover_file);
Permissions
I don’t know if this helped or not but I also chown -R www:www /path/to/video_dir and chmod -R 755 /path/to/video_dir
Conclusion
Its easy enough to modify Mythweb but its probably not recommended. With the next update I am sure this will break.
