Provides utilities for personal video recorders (PVRs) (e.g. a Dreambox).
At the moment there is only one utility script: cleanup.py. It solves the
following problem.
If you let your PVR automatically record all your favorite TV shows and films then its hard drive will eventually fill up. So from time to time you have to manually delete old recordings to make room for new recordings. This is a chore. A chore that can be easily forgotten. And then you come home from a stressful day looking forward to watching the brand new episode of your favorite TV show only to find your PVR not having recorded it because its hard drive was full.
With cleanup.py this will never ever happen to you again.
Just copy cleanup.py to your PVR and create a cronjob that runs it every
night. cleanup.py will then delete your old recordings (starting with the
oldest one) until there is again a configurable amount of free space available
on your hard drive.
Here is what cleanup.py --help says:
Cleans up one or many given directories until a given amount of free space is
available on the device of those directories. See the usage method below for
further details.
Usage: cleanup.py [OPTIONS] [DIRECTORY ...]
You can specify one or many directories to clean up. All those directories
must be on the same device. Otherwise the script aborts. If you do not specify
a directory then the default directory is used: /hdd/media/movie.
Options:
-h, --help Show this help message.
-s MIN_AVAIL_SPACE Specifies the minimal amount of space in megabytes you
wish to have available on the device with the given
directories. The default is 51200 MB (50 GB).
If MIN_AVAIL_SPACE is already available on the device with the given directories
then this script deletes nothing and exists with a corresponding message.
Otherwise the script cleans up the given directories as follows:
1. It recursively finds all files in the given directories.
2. It deletes the oldest files (according to their modification time (mtime))
until MIN_AVAIL_SPACE is available on the device with the given
directories or there are no more files to delete.
The script does NOT delete any (sub) directories.
Examples:
./cleanup.py
./cleanup.py /path/to/my/recordings
./cleanup.py -s 12000 /path/to/my/recordings
./cleanup.py -s 12000 /path/to/my/recordings /some/other/dir
If you have a wget or curl with HTTPS support installed on your PVR then
telnet into your PVR and download cleanup.py directly, e.g.,
$ telnet dm8000
$ wget https://raw.github.com/jbretsch/pvrutils/master/cleanup.py
Otherwise download cleanup.py first, upload it to your PVR, and telnet into
your PVR afterwards e.g.
$ wget https://raw.github.com/jbretsch/pvrutils/master/cleanup.py
$ ftp -u ftp://root@dm8000/ cleanup.py
$ telnet dm8000
Make it executable.
$ chmod u+x cleanup.py
Run cleanup.py manually to test it. You have to know where your recordings
reside. (In Dreamboxes this is usually /hdd/media/movie). And you have to
decide how much free space there should be available after each cleanup.py
run. If you are happy with the defaults (recordings in /hdd/media/movie and
at least 50GB available space), then you can run cleanup.py without any
further options.
$ ./cleanup.py
Otherwise pass different directories to clean up on the command line or use the
-s option to specify a different desired amount of free space. See the usage
information above for details.
Now create a cronjob to let cleanup.py run periodically. For example, call
$ crontab -e
and add the line
0 3 * * * /home/root/cleanup.py
to the file that opens if cleanup.py resides in /home/root and you want it
to be run every night at 3 o'clock.
See if your cron daemon actually runs by checking if
$ ps aux | grep cron | grep -v grep
outputs anything. If not then find out how to start it and start it. On a Dreambox you can run
$ update-rc.d busybox-cron defaults
$ /etc/init.d/busybox-cron start
to start the cron daemon and make sure that it starts with every Dreambox start.