New Install on RPi - Importing Finished Recordings

Clay Glenn

About 5 years ago I put together a small home server on a Raspberry Pi with a USB hard drive attached. I installed TVH for recording OTA broadcasts using a HD Homerun tuner and a second RPi running Kodi as a front-end media center. That worked well until recently when TVH stopped responding to Kodi or to the web interface. I figured it was time for me to update everything, so I am building an updated server system.

I have updated the Raspberry Pi OS to ver 11 Bullseye and installed TVH ver 4.3. I have pointed TVH to the USB hard drive for storage of recorded TV programs, the same hard drive as before. That drive still has all the old recordings, mostly workout videos. How do I get TVH to recognize those recordings and populate them in the Finished Recordings list? I have all of the files from the old system. Is there some configuration file that I can import or copy from the old system to the fresh installation?

I am sort of a Linux Newbie. I can see the TVH directories in the Home directory, but I don't know how to open them or copy them. I think I don't understand the permissions attributes. If I need to import an old configuration file, can I copy/move it with the GUI file manager? Or do I need to use the CLI commands? Do I just need to use "sudo" in order to override the permissions? Or do I need to change the permissions? Is there some easier way within the TVH program to just tell it to recognize the existing recordings that are already there? I have tried searching here and elsewhere for answers, but I probably don't know the proper name for what I am trying to do. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks,
Clay

davep

TVH keeps track of recordings using the files normally found in /home/hts/.hts/tvheadend/dvr/log. There is one file per recording (including recordings yet to be made, ie timers). If you have the files from the old system you can copy them to the corresponding location in the new one (after shutting down TVH).

Each file contains the full filesystem path to the recording, so if your USB hard drive is mounted to a different place in the filesystem you will need to edit all of these files. If there are a lot of them it might be easier to change the mount point...

TVH normally runs as user 'hts', and all of its files are owned by that user. You will need to use CLI commands to copy files and use 'sudo' to override file permissions.