Building a YouTube Plugin for mythTV

So I have been busy with my studies. Just finished 1st year of my MBA curriculum and have been thinking what to do during my break besides playing with my son. I built a youtube plugin for my mythTV.

YouTube is a massive collection of videos. Google provides the "Zend" youTube API in php and other languages, which allows programmatic access to a user's playlist, user's subscriptions and user's favourite lists. I decided to tap into this zend YouTube API to build a youTube plugin. Following are the characteristics of this plugin:

1. It is written entirely in php and uses zend youTube php libraries.
2. Currently it downloads videos from a user's public favorite and playlists.
3. It downloads the youTube videos as mp4 file (video:mpeg4, audio codec: acc) with a resolution which allows these files to be played on iPod.
4. It uses cclive (it is available on yum or apt repository) to download video entries.

References:
The youTube API is available at:
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_php.html

Prerequisite
1. You have a mythtv user (in my case I call it mythtv and I have auto login enabled for this user). The home dir for this user is /home/mythtv. Please replace it appropriately if you are using a different mythtv user.
2. Provide sudo permission to mythtv user. This is needed because the playlist xml files has to be created in /usr/share/mythtv directory.
3. Install the Google's youTube zend API. I have it installed in ~/opt folder of mythtv user.


Configuration Steps:

1. Integrating into the mythtv menu: The mythtv is installed by default in the following folder (on fedora): "/usr/share/mythtv". The mainmenu.xml is the entry point for the mythTV GUI for building the menu. I added the following to the mainmenu.xml file:

<button>
<type>MOVIETIMES</type>
<text>YouTube Favorites</text>
<action>MENU youTube_plugin.xml</action>
</button>;

as a child node of mythmenu element

2. Creating the youTube plugin xml file link: create a soft link youTube_plugin.xml pointing to -> /home/mythtv/.mythtv/youTube_plugin.xml

cd /usr/share/mythtv
sudo ln -s /home/mythtv/.mythtv/youTube_plugin.xml

3. Install the youTubeFav.php plugin, chmod +x it and configure it to run as a cron job nightly.

4. Setup the youtube account ids in the ~/.youTubeCfg file
USERS_LIST=<youtube user ids seperated by commas>
DOWNLOAD=1
DOWNLOAD_DIR=x # not currently used
CREATE_PLAYLISTS=1
DOWNLOAD_FAVORITES_VIDEOS=0
DOWNLOAD_PLAYLIST_VIDEOS=1


It's is fun to watch your youTube playlist and favorites on TV as well as on your iPod/iPhone or iTouch. The nightly cron job keeps your TV and iPod synchronized.

I will provide more details in my next post with links to this youTubeFav.php script and mechanisms to copy the syncing these mp4 files to iPod. Please watch my next post for details. You can subscribe or follow this blog with buttons on right.