Renaming Sage recordings through API

[jominor]

Does the Sage API offer a means to access the wizard.bin or does it have anything that can allow you to rename a physical file. For example, if I can compress a file to .avi, them have Sage point to the new file, but maintain the old information, that'll work.

[nielm]

What you need to do is:

1. Set new file's timestamp to the start time + file duration (This is how sage calculates the file start time)
2. Rename .mpg file to .old
3. Find the MediaFile object for the Sage Recording
4. Get the Airing Object for the MediaFile: air=GetMediaFileAiring(mf)
5. Tell Sage that the file has been deleted: RemoveMediaFile(mf)
6. Add the new .avi as a new media file: mf2=AddMediaFile("c:\\path\\to\\file","")
7. Associate the old airing to the new media file: SetMediaFileAiring(mf2,air)
8. The new file is now flagged as an archived file... you can unset this by calling: MoveTVFileOutOfLibrary(mf2)

If you have auto-edited the media file, you may want to create a new Airing that is the same duration as the edited media file, otherwise it may show up as a partial recording (but there were fixes relating to this in 4.1.7/8)

see the edit show info part of the webserver java code for other hints, but this is more complex because it creates a new Show and new Airing as well as renaming the media file.

[Opus4]

It has been a long time since I played with something like this, but doesn't SageTV automatically recognize the files now, as long as you keep the ID number as part of the filename? If done while SageTV isn't running, it will change the file assignment when it restarts. If done while SageTV is running, 'delete' the recording entry for the mpg file (which isn't there any more because you already moved it elsewhere or deleted it) & SageTV will find the avi version. (But, it can be tricky doing that while it is still running; maybe nielm's steps would make that safer.)

See this post for someone else's comments.

- Andy

[jominor]

Originally Posted by nielm

What you need to do is:

Whew! Thanks and that is quite a mouthful. Jeff, would you add an API call to the Sage API that would allow third-parties to rename files. It seems that being able to do this would have benefits for both archival and standard sage recordings and would be a good first step towards some kind of implace compression.

[nielm]

The process Opus4 describes will trigger the same behaviour as mine behind-the-scenes...
When Sage scans the video dirs:

1. it finds that a mediafile is missing
2. it removes the mediafile object from the DB (same as step 3 above)
3. It finds a new file with a filename in the standard format (showname-airingID-0.avi)
4. It gets the airingID from the file name and finds it in the DB
5. It adds the new media file to the DB scanning it for the duration, and working out the start time from the file timestamp-duration. (same as steps 6)
6. It assigns the found airing info to it (same as steps 7-8)

So, the same thing really. The difference is that if done via the API, the changes are immediate, and you can be sure that the Airing info is correctly mapped, while using Sage's automatic system, there are occasions where the AiringID on the file does not match the AiringID in the DB, so the show info will not be found by sage and will be lost. (see the linked thread for why).