I've been recently wanting a video blog aggregator which integrates with
MythTV. Specifically, I wanted the videos to appear as recordings. I've
had a horrible script for that for a few months, but ended up cleaning
it up when it occurred to me that Akimbo (http://www.akimbo.com) is just
a per user RSS feed, and something a lot like MythTV.

So, I wrote MythNetTv. It takes RSS feeds, imports the entries in the
feed and builds a TODO list. It then downloads shows and imports them
into the MythTV recordings menu.

This implementation has advantages over other RSS readers for MythTV in that
it:

 - ignores the content of the post -- it's all about the video files
 - queues downloads, instead of making them when feeds are added, or new shows
   are posted (this stops you from running out of disk, or having a huge show
   backlog)

The code has now been used by a variety of people, but its possible there are
still bugs. If you want to give it a try, please take good backups. You can 
find the code here:

http://www.stillhq.com/mythtv/mythnettv/

Before use, you need to make a temporary data directory in your current
working directory:

$ mkdir data

You also need to install Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser from
http://www.feedparser.org. On Debian or Ubuntu you can install it like this:

$ sudo apt-get install python-feedparser

You Python ctypes support. On Debian / Ubuntu, its as simple as:

$ sudo apt-get install python-ctypes

You also need the Python MySQL module:

$ sudo apt-get install python-mysqldb

Finally, you need mplayer and mecoder:

$ sudo apt-get install mplayer mencoder

Using MythNetTv is simple -- here's the usage message:

$ ./mythnettv
Unknown command line. Try one of:

Unknown command line. Try one of:

(manual usage)
  --url <url> <title> : to download an RSS feed and load the shows
                        from it into the TODO list. The title is
                        as the show title in the MythTV user
                        interface
  --file <url> <title>: to do the same, but from a file, with a show
                        title like --url above
  --download <num>    : to download that number of shows from the
                        TODO list. We download some of the oldest
                        first, and then grab some of the newest as
                        well.

(handy stuff)
  --todoremote        : add a remote URL to the TODO list. This will
                        prompt for needed information about the
                        video, and set the date of the program to
                        now
  --todoremote <url> <title> <subtitle> <description>
                      : the same as above, but don't prompt for
                        anything
  --importremote      : download and immediately import the named
                        URL. Will prompt for needed information
  --importremote <url> <title> <subtitle> <description>
                      : the same as above, but don't prompt for
                        anything
  --importlocal <file>: import the named file. The file will be
                        left on disk. Will prompt for needed
                        information

(subscription management)
  --subscribe <url> <title>
                      : subscribe to a URL, and specify the show title
  --list              : list subscriptions
  --unsubscribe <url> : unsubscribe from a URL
  --update            : add new programs from subscribed URLs to the
                        TODO list

(reporting)
  --statistics        : show some simple statistics about MythIPTV
  --log               : dump the current internal log entries
  --nextdownload <num>
                      : if you executed --download <num>, what would
                        be downloaded?

There are a few options here. If you want MythNetTv to manage your
subscriptions, then do something like:

$ ./mythnettv --subscribe \
"http://video.google.com/videofeed?type=search&q=engedu&so=1&num=20&output=rss" \
"Goole EngEdu"

You can update the view of the feed (i.e. find new posts) with:

$ ./mythnettv --update

And you can find out what you are subscribed to with:

$ ./mythnettv --list

To download shows, just tell it how many:

$ ./mythnettv --download 10

Will download 10 shows and import them into the MythTV recordings menu.

You can also manually download an RSS feed just once, import local or remote
videos, and get interesting statistics. Checkout the usage message for more
information about those.

Cheers,
Mikal (mikal@stillhq.com)