[bolt]

Because I have several media shares on my network that I don't control and whose files don't follow a proper naming scheme, the library and recent files features of XBMC don't work well for me. Since I thought a What's Changed list would be nice to have, I coded a python script that runs automatically and gives me a daily list of new files. I also coded a video plugin to go along with it.

The files are here.

The first script, changed.py, can be run as a cronjob with the following options.

Code:

changed.py -u -a -w
    -u=update
    -a=don't print changes to the commandline
    -w=create a webpage of changes(HOME/.changed/html/index.html)

It creates a webpage that needs a web server to expose it to XBMC. I run it with the following crontab entry, which runs once an hour.

Code:

0 * * * * /home/USER/bin/changed.py -u -a -w

To configure it, create a file named HOME/.changed/sources that is a list of directories for the script to track, one per line.

Code:

/mnt/HOST1/SHARE/dir/
/mnt/HOST2/SHARE/dir/

The prefix, /mnt/, is striped when making the webpage and can be changed in the script. The mount points need to mirror the path that XBMC will see because the video plugin just adds smb:// to it to find the files.

It runs on a linux server. A windows server might be able to use it with shares mapped to drive letters but I haven't tested it.

The Changed directory contains the video plugin and should be dropped into the video plugins directory. It needs to be modified to point to wherever the index.html file created above resides.

This is pretty much tailored to my set-up but I hope someone else finds it useful.